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It's more than just a ticket. Today's episode of Radical Personal Finance is sponsored by Bombfell, an easier way for men to get better clothes. Save $25 off your first order at bombfell.com/rpf. Bombfell. Men and Clothes. Today's question comes in from Aaron in California. Hi, Joshua. I love listening to your podcast.

I know you've had a few episodes recently in reaction to current events. As a resident of the Bay Area, I hope you could do an episode in relation to wildfires. Well, Erica, I'll give it a crack. Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, the show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge, skills, insight, and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now while building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less.

Today we will tackle this wildfire topic. I'll do the best that I can with the goal of helping you to preserve your life, your property, and the life and property of others. If you're anything like me, I would imagine that you have watched with great interest and fascination at the events of the California wildfires of the past few days.

Certainly extremely, extremely destructive. Just to watch the fire spreading all throughout parts of California. Many, many fires and the stories that are coming out are just incredible. The videos that are coming out in our modern era are really, really stunning. Really, really stunning. If you're interested, I've just shared a number of ones that I found on my Twitter feed, twitter.com/joshuasheats.

You can go and find some curated links there to videos of people who've been interacting with these wildfires. So in the course of today's show, I'm going to try to give you some helpful ideas and suggestions that will be broadly applicable. There are a lot of factors that would deeply affect your experience with a wildfire.

Big difference between being part of a suburb versus being out in a rural area. But I think that there are some lessons that all of us could learn from watching the news and reading about some of the stories because in some ways disasters are unique and wildfires are certainly unique.

Get to that in a moment. But in some ways disasters are common. There are many parallels between some of the things I've done shows on in past days, preparing for a flood or preparing for a hurricane. In many ways, these things have parallels. When you boil it all down in the end, basically you're trying to make sure that you ensure physical safety for lives.

That's the most important thing. Ensure physical safety for you and for your family, your loved ones, your pets, and then to ensure physical safety for property whenever possible. And so we can take mitigation plans and do our best to protect our property. There are different techniques that we can use to protect property.

And then if we suffer the loss of property, then we want to make sure that we attend to the human needs, the human comforts, and that we attend to figuring out the best way to get the property reestablished. I mean that's basically the function and flow of it. And in that way, all disasters are common.

Most of the time, you're going to stay put right where you are unless the disaster will cause you to be unsafe where you are. And then your number one goal is to get out. You want to make sure that you get out with the supplies, as many supplies as possible to sustain you and your family in as much comfort as possible and as much safety as possible.

And then you want to protect your property to the greatest degree possible. Sometimes that means loading the property up and getting it out of the danger zone. Sometimes that just means putting things in place to protect it from an inundation with a flood or a fire, et cetera. So in that way, we can learn some lessons.

And then I'll try to share some other things that are specific to fires. Now, wildfires are very different or are different in many ways than home fires. I've done quite a bit of thinking and research around home fire safety and I believe that it's an important area of focus for us.

There are very few disasters more devastating than a complete and total destructive fire, whether that's a home fire, somebody dropped a cigarette in their bed and lit the bed, lit the house on fire or cooking fire or something that spread, or whether it was the cause of a wildfire.

You look at a house that has been burned down and it's very easy for everything to be lost. And then whatever does remain sometimes is just so inundated with smoke that it's destroyed. It's very common. Even if I think of the second most catastrophic or the third most catastrophic thing, something like a tornado would be a very catastrophic natural disaster.

But oftentimes you may have things in the basement that will survive the tornado or maybe you have things that are in a safe that will survive the tornado. Well, the fire doesn't discriminate. You've got a long and hot fire and your fireproof safe doesn't do any good. When the fire is long enough and hot enough, it'll destroy everything inside of it, no matter how good your safe is.

If there are no firefighters coming who can put the fire out in an hour or two, even the best of fireproof safes will give way and the contents will be destroyed. Even something like a flood, floods are devastating because they can really ruin everything. But in many ways, if the first floor of your house floods, maybe there are still items on the second floor that are okay.

Or maybe the flood inundation comes in slowly enough that you can take your property and move it to higher ground or put it into plastic Tupperware containers. Of course, I'm being optimistic, but just demonstrating the point that I can't think of anything more destructive than a fire. And then the speed with which a fire comes is especially destructive.

If you're dealing with a home fire, something that just happened, electrical wire shorted out in the attic and caught the insulation on fire, you got to get out. And so it's a matter of, we got to go. And these wildfires, one of the most awful things about the current wildfires has been the speed with which they have spread.

Headline from Monday, October 16, 2017, Wall Street Journal put it this way, "Wildfire victims had only seconds to make choices." Sub headline, "California's deadliest blazes advanced 100 yards every three seconds." That is incredible. I mean, you put yourself in a situation like that, from end zone to end zone on a football field in three seconds.

Things are moving fast. Understatement of the day right there. We're going to save the topic of home fires for another occasion today, talk about wildfires. And one quick caveat for you, I have no personal experience in dealing with wildfires. I've had an interest in it, especially since watching the devastation of the Fort McMurray wildfires last summer up in Canada.

And so I've taken an interest in studying the subject. But if I get anything wrong, if there's anything that you observe from those of you who are in fire country that I got wrong, please correct me on it. But I think that I've got – I wouldn't be recording the show if I didn't believe that I have some useful ideas and commentary to make that will help you, even due to my own personal lack of experience.

Thing one, get out. Now, we've talked about this and it's complicated in a wildfire. But one of the most valuable aspects of preparedness that you can make for yourself is make a plan to get out of the danger zone, to get out of the problem area. If you can simply physically not be where problems are, you'll have a much easier time surviving personally and the care for your life and the life of those you love is the most important thing.

And you'll have a much easier time recovering. It's very hard to recover from a disaster when you've gone through it. It's much easier to come in on the other side when – and try to pick up the pieces than it is to make it through and then try to pick up the pieces.

And so your goal is if there's a problem, to get out early and not be one of those who films a video that becomes famous on YouTube. Now, this is complicated by the way that wildland fires work. Many people may live on the perimeter of a wildfire and they may live in a state of uncertainty for many weeks.

Wildfires seem to have – sometimes they have an ability to contain them but then sometimes a quick change in the weather may make all of the difference. And so I'm not pretending that the simplistic advice of get out and be fine with being gone for all of fire season, it just doesn't work.

But it is important that you pay careful attention and if you see danger or you see prospective danger, start making preparations to get out. When people are living in a zone of danger like a wildfire all around that may affect their community, different people have different responses. But the best response for you is at the very least to do planning and preparation.

Now, it may not be appropriate for you to evacuate two weeks – for two weeks. That may not be doable. That may not be appropriate. But at least you can go ahead and make preparation. One thing that all of us need to have prepared at all times is an evacuation checklist.

We've thought through some of the biggest decisions in advance. For example, many people are flummoxed when faced with the need to evacuate from their home to their own safety. They don't know what to take with them. So it's good and important for us to have a list of what are we going to take with us.

If you have family members, husband, wife, children, you want to make sure that that list of things to take with us when possible is divided by who can load this up, who can get these certain things, so we don't miss something important. How are we going to get out?

Do we have a car? Do we have a van? Do we have a trailer? How much stuff can we get out? Many people, if you're facing fire, you should seriously consider which items are going to be the most important if my house burns down and can I get them out of here physically.

If you're leaving at the last moment and you've got a small car to get into, you're not going to get much out. But if you've got time, perhaps it'd be worth it to load up a couple of things that are larger but very valuable to you. Where will you go and what route will you take to get there?

This needs to be thought of in advance. In a previous show, I talked about looking at a map and choosing directions and a few places to go in all four cardinal directions. You can't choose which direction a fire is going to come from, although you can study in advance and understand the likely movement of the fire based upon the wind patterns and the changes in terrain.

But you can't choose which direction it's certainly going to come from and the wind may change. And so you need to have potential destinations to go and stay with friends or families or at the very least to have a destination of a hotel in all four directions. So if you choose a hotel that's an hour and then maybe one that's two or three hours away from your house in all four directions, just choose a reasonable hotel and then have a goal of having that hotel's phone number written down so that you can quickly call and make a reservation.

That's very helpful so that you have an idea and a destination. So in a situation like this, when someone has thought through in advance, "If I need to go, what do I need to take with me? How are we going to gather these things together? How are we going to leave?

And what are some of the routes and where will we go?" If you've thought through some of these big questions, then you're not going to be caught so flat-footed when the disaster comes. And you can look at it and make your assessments at the time and not be quite so worried about it.

You should maintain for yourself a checklist of the most important things. And ideally, these important things should always be kept in a central location where you know, "I can grab all of these things quickly." It's one thing to have a week or two weeks of warning on a fire.

It's another thing to be awakened by a fireman banging on the door saying, "You got to get out now." I recommend that you keep either possibly a file system, a foldering system, a bag of some kind handy where you can quickly and easily make sure that you have everything that's important, your cash, cash reserves, currency reserves, checkbooks, banking information, credit cards, the backups of your computer files and hard drives, all of your proofs of insurance, your insurance paperwork, your deeds to your house, anything to keep your phones going and other things like that.

And then all the physical things that you need, prescription medications, everything loaded up, eyeglasses for those of you who wear eyeglasses. Make sure that you have all of those things prepared and planned and that you have, that you keep a list of them at the very least, a list so that you can gather them quickly.

And don't waste the time of preparation. If there's a fire coming and you haven't done that, then go ahead and get those things together. Once you have those most essential things gathered, if you're facing danger and you have advance warning, go ahead and get together the most important things, the mementos, the things that aren't going to sustain your life but that you'd be devastated to lose and pack them up, pack the car.

Much easier to pack the car and have it all loaded up and then have to unpack it than to have to hit the road without those important things and come back to a flattened house. Now, in just a moment, I'll talk about planning for having to get out in a hurry when you've got 30 or 60 or 90 seconds of warning, when you got to go right away and what to do to be prepared for that.

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But I'm going to save you $25. Just go to bombfell.com/rpf. B-O-M-B-F-E-L-L.com/rpf. Now let's talk about what to do if you got to get out in seconds. The only way to be prepared to evacuate your home in a few minutes is to have the most important things pre-packed. Every member of your family should, including your pets, every member of your family should at all times have a bag or a suitcase, a backpack, a duffel bag, a suitcase, even a box of some kind that's packed with the basic things that would be necessary to sustain themselves, to sustain you, and to sustain each of them for at least about three days.

If you go on the federal disaster websites, you'll find lists at the FEMA disaster websites of what you should keep in a kit, of a 72-hour kit. Commonly in the online world, they call it a bug-out bag if you got to bug out, if you got to get out in a moment.

Now the contents that you should put in such a kit will vary. The importance of the contents will vary depending on what type of emergency is forcing you to leave. For example, if you are fleeing from a wildfire that is attacking your neighborhood, the most important content of your 72-hour bag is going to be your backups of your electronic documents.

I recommend to you that you make a digital backup and archive of all of your most important documents. You can do this easily if you have a scanner or have access to a scanner. Many people have a scanner that they can use at work. That would be fine. Or if you just simply use your phone and install a scanning app on your phone and scan the pictures of your most important documents.

For example, birth certificates, marriage licenses, all of the insurance information, copies of your insurance policies, or at the very least, you should maintain an Excel document, a spreadsheet that contains all of the numbers of the insurance policies, contact information, etc. All of these items need to be prepared in advance.

I recommend that you save the files, that you create a directory, you should create an Excel spreadsheet that has a listing of all of your property, serial numbers for anything that you own that has serial numbers on it. Again, bank account information, login information, that file should be carefully encrypted.

It should be stored in an encrypted vault on a memory stick of some kind, SD card works well or a USB memory stick works well. You should take very, very careful with that information. If I were you, I would recommend using an encrypted file within an encrypted container within an encrypted drive.

You've got triple encryption. Now, if that's beyond your skill level with encryption protocols, then simplify that and do something a little bit easier for you. But that information needs to be protected. On there, you should have photographs of all of your property, especially anything that you're going to need to demonstrate for your insurance claims.

So you should photograph your property. You should regularly do a video tour of your home to demonstrate the value of the property that's in your home. It's not unusual for people to accumulate tens of thousands of dollars of furniture and other property and you may need that when it comes time to filing your home insurance claim.

You should keep on there current photos of your family members. And this file and this drive, it should be duplicated. One should be stored with you. One should be stored in an off-site location, in a secure location, but completely off-site, whether that is something that you have access to, for example, a safety deposit box that you maintain, or whether that's in somebody else's safety deposit box or somebody else that maybe somebody else in their personal safe.

It should be stored in another location as well in case you can't get out or you can't get it out. But that should be in your bag. That will have applicability long – in many things more than just in a fire. But it will come into place in a fire.

For example, one thing that I recommend is that you maintain in there relatively current photos of every member of your family in case that photo needed to be put on a missing persons poster. One of the major challenges right now in California is there are, in my memory, over 40 people confirmed dead, but there are about 150-ish people who are missing right now.

And hopefully most of those people will show up, but it's valuable to have a photo that can be distributed carefully. And it's nice to have one that is just this very simple photo of your children in case they were ever missing. And it's nice to have that available to you.

So very quickly you can pass that along to the authorities who will then distribute it to help you to get your children back. It takes time to go through and put these things together. But once you've done it, for the most part, you've got it. And so here is a list of things that I recommend that you consider and make sure that you have for the future.

So information such as social security cards, copies of your driver's licenses, birth certificates, copies of your passports, marriage certificates. And of course here I'm talking about both physical copies ready to go in a moment's notice, but also digital backups in case your physical copies are burned up. Records on all of your financial accounts, all of your bank, investment, credit cards, loan accounts, all of the information on how to access those accounts, a backup of your password database should be included there, phone numbers and account numbers for all of your accounts.

Health records, very important and valuable to have. So that's immunization records or information on your allergies, dietary restrictions, current medications or past medical and surgical treatments. That's particularly valuable. Pet information, descriptions of your pet, photos of your pets, contact information for your vet, any medical notes or medications that they may be on.

Listings of all of your property, information on your car, your home, any kind of home inventory items, photos, a video tour is also excellent and valuation estimates can be useful as well. Insurance documents, all of the insurance documents and especially having those things with you because sometimes if your home's burned down, you're going to be filing insurance claims from a hotel room.

Copies of your wills and medical directives and then any other valuable things like photographs or other things that can be digitized. In today's world where storage has become so cheap, there's no reason not to digitize all of your important and valuable photos and keep those on a secured computer drive in an off-site location backed up.

So if you got to get out quick, grab your bags, get in the car and go. Now a couple things that are important. Hopefully your car needs to work and this is one of the reasons why as with anything, we need to give good attention to our vehicles, make sure they're in good working order.

Nothing like a good disaster movie when the car is sitting there and not starting. Dante's Peak was one of my favorite years ago and I think there was a scene like that in there. The mountain is blowing up, got to get off the volcano mountain and of course the cars don't want to start when they need to.

So keep the car going and make sure there's always gas in the car. That's one of the reasons why I recommend making a habit to keep the car at least always a third or half full and make sure that you have enough gas in the car in case you ever need to go.

One interesting story, let me read to you now from the Wall Street Journal article, Wildfire Victims Had Only Seconds to Make Choices. This was the lead to the story. Ukiah, California. Hurtling down a mile-long dirt driveway, the wildfire closing in, Eli Monroe pulled to a stop at a crossroads.

He sat for a moment with his girlfriend, his parents in the car behind them deciding which way to turn on Tomkey Road. The fastest way out was to the right, toward Route 101, a freeway they had hoped would take them to safety. Flames licked the roadsides in that direction.

A left turn would lead to creeks and backcountry dirt roads they hadn't traveled in months, a route that carried the risk of a death trap. They went left. As they passed a few cars speeding the opposite way, Mr. Monroe, 34 years old, recalled thinking, "Why are we the only ones going this direction?

Are we digging our own grave?" Now dropping down in the story, we read this about Mr. Monroe. Mr. Monroe and his family got their warning call, more on that in a moment, at 12.48 a.m. Monday and began alerting neighbors. Less than 45 minutes later, they were in their cars deciding if he should turn left toward the dirt road through the woods.

He thought he could recall the way from past trips to the Eel River during summers growing up there. Once they hit the dirt road, the fire began to recede. A tire on Mr. Monroe's mom's car blew out after the last creek crossing, but by then they were safe. On Wednesday, they learned their home and most of the others around them off Tom Key Road were destroyed.

So one of the most important things, you need to keep your vehicle in good working order so that it can get you out of there when you need to. You need to have the equipment, the fuel to get you there. But then it's important to have those routes and that route information on hand.

One of the things that has made combating these fire or getting people notification warnings in this particular wildfire incidents, these incidents in California has been that the cell phone service has not been working reliably. Some of the cell phone towers have been burned and so the cell phone coverage has been fairly spotty.

This has made it difficult to issue evacuation alerts for the authorities in some cases. It's resulted in some people not getting the alert. But this can be a real problem if you depend only on your cell phone for the knowledge of where to go and how to get out.

And frankly, most of us do. We're so accustomed now to having our GPS on our cell phone that many of us don't maintain maps in our cars. Many of us don't have external GPS units and many of us don't pay as much attention as we probably should to knowing how to navigate around our own houses.

So that can be a major problem. I recommend that you always keep a GPS unit in your car that's not connected to the cell phone grid. You can buy a GPS unit today for a brand new one from Garmin or TomTom or whomever for a hundred bucks for a cheap one.

You could probably find a used one for less. And the great thing is those types of GPSs don't require the cell phone network to work like our phones do. And so if you all of a sudden have the normal way that you would go out to the right, but it looks like there's fire there and you've got to go take the back roads to the left, that GPS may very well get you out.

And I think even in navigating, some of the videos of people trying to navigate through the actual fire, people who couldn't even – who couldn't drive because they couldn't see, I think even there a GPS unit would be helpful. I don't see any reason why it wouldn't work in the middle of the fire.

I know for me when I'm driving in foggy conditions, I rely upon the GPS as a secondary safety device to help me make sure I'm anticipating the curves that are coming up in the road and it helps me to see better. Another thing of course is maps, having maps of your area, state maps and local maps so that if you do need to get out on back roads that you're not used to driving all the time, that you know the way out and you can work your way out on a map.

One more comment – two more comments on evacuations. One is with regard to when to go, one of the interesting controversies that's emerging from this current fire situation is the notification system. It's important that if there is a notification system in your area that you put yourself on it.

That's being a part of the official local emergency preparedness app or getting on the reverse 911 phone system or being able to get those alerts. Sign up for the alerts so you make sure that you have the information that you need. In an emergency, information is crucial and so you should have multiple ways of getting information.

Yes, the local Facebook group or yes, the local fire page is going to be very valuable but make sure that you also have a radio that's not dependent upon the cell phone network. Make sure that you're also signed up for the text alerts which may come through when your data access isn't working on your phone.

So make sure that you have the information but listen to it and make your own decision. You've got to always filter information from government officials by recognizing the fact that they are responsible for the masses. The emergency managers there in – I forget which county it was – in California, here, Sonoma County – let me read from the Wall Street Journal article.

Hannah User, a spokeswoman for Sonoma County, said officials decided not to send a wireless emergency alert which would have gone to every cell phone in the area. "Emergency managers noted potential risks of these types of alerts causing clogged roads and unnecessary panic, making it hard for those who were in the most significant danger to get out safely," Ms.

User said. "We chose the best tools available to ensure residents who were in the most significant danger had the safest path possible to get out." Officials said they planned to analyze the decision after the fires were over. For now, they said they are focused on protecting people from further harm.

Government officials always have to think in terms of the masses. That's usually not going to be good for you because you're not concerned with the masses. You're concerned with you and you're concerned with those that are close to you. You've got to always do what's right for you and make sure to care for yourself.

And you've got to do it a little bit out of sync with the masses in order for things to work properly. Here in Florida, we're coming to the end of hurricane season. Right now, I can go down and I can get all the plywood that I want to get with no rationing.

I can get all the bottled water that I want to get with no rationing. I can get as many generators as I want. I can fill up as many gas cans at the gas station as I want. I can get all the canned food. I can load up my house with all the materials that I need to get me through a hurricane.

And there's no problem. I'm not causing any problems for anyone else and they're not causing any problems for me. But as soon as there's a hurricane that's headed our way, the rationing starts, the supplies dry up because the masses start to move in that direction. Don't be part of the masses.

If there's a fire that's threatening and emergency officials are thinking about notifications, they don't want to clog the roads all of a sudden because then they'll get accused of saying, "Hey, you clogged the roads and now 300 people died because the roads were clogged." That's a valid concern that they have to face, but that's not your concern.

So you get out. Now let's talk about some equipment that's unique to fires. I think it's important that you prepare for a fire evacuation. Now, one simple way to do this, a few pieces of equipment that are important in your bug out bag and your 72-hour kit, you should always have something like leather gloves.

When fires start to come, heat starts to occur. This is the same in house fires. One thing in a house fire, you should keep in your home fire emergency kit, thick leather gloves that would help you be able to get out of the house if your home was on fire with just you, a normal house fire, not even a wildland fire.

Those should be in your fire kits. One of the videos that I watched from California was a cell phone video of two young men who were trying to get out of the fire and one of them had to get out to open a gate. He couldn't open the gate or he opened the gate, but he burned his hands because the metal was so hot.

So gloves would have protected his hands. This should be a standard part of your earthquake kit if you live in California. Obviously, you face a major risk and anywhere where earthquakes are likely. You face a major risk of an earthquake and if there's an earthquake and there's a building collapse around you, you want to make sure that you have gloves available to you in your emergency kit so that you can dig your way out or possibly dig to save a family member, something like that.

So gloves are very valuable. With regard to fire safety, one of the things that I would think is a very valuable accessory to have is one of those smoke hoods or air hoods that is commonly sold for escape from house fire. There are good ones on the market that will last you for about an hour of use.

In a wildfire, a wildfire sucks up all the oxygen and it kills people just if you're even in the middle of it. You may not burn your flesh, but it can destroy your lungs and it can kill you just from there not being any air to breathe. In the same video with the two young men, if you're interested in seeing it, go to my Twitter page, twitter.com/JoshuaSheets and you can find it and watch it on YouTube.

The same video, the guy got out of the car and he couldn't breathe. He got back in the car. He said, "I can't get out again because I can't breathe." There was no air out of the car for him to breathe. So you can have some of those smoke hoods available to you.

Those can save your life in a house fire, allow you to get out without experiencing smoke inhalation, and they can save your life in a wildfire. Hopefully those ideas, although I'm sure they're incomplete, are helpful to help you plan to protect life, which is the most important thing. Now what about protecting property?

Here, there are things that you can do long in advance and things that you can do a little bit in advance. I'm sure that if you live in a wildland fire area, you receive information and advice on preparing your home for fire. Of course, whether or not this will be effective, obviously it depends.

The fires that have been going through some of the neighborhoods essentially look like they're just going house to house. If you've chosen to situate your house in a subdivision where you're very close to your neighbor's houses, well, if your neighbor's houses catch on fire, very likely it's going to catch your house on fire.

They're just simply that close. It's different than being out in a rural area. But there are a lot of things that can be done to fight fire. Years ago, I first became interested in permaculture design. One of the things that most interested me, I started reading publications by Bill Mollison, who was one of the founders of what is called permaculture, which is a design strategy for basically designing life intelligently, life systems, life-supporting systems intelligently.

I was fascinated to read and to listen to some of his stuff on fire prevention. I had never thought, not being from the country and being from Florida, I'd never thought about designing a property in order to be protected from fire. But I've become convinced that it's very doable to actually think about how you situate your house and think about these things in order to limit the risk.

If I ever were to develop a property where I had the space to do it, I would try to take into account all of these things and design the property to be protected from fire. One of the things that interested me after the Fort McMurray wildfires last summer, I started researching why some people would say, "I'll stay behind." Even knowledgeable people would say, "I'll stay behind and fight the fire." I, not having been through a wildland fire, hadn't understood how they spread.

But since then, I've learned that fires, wildland fires, are very fightable, at least under appropriate conditions. Many times, the way that they spread is through throwing embers out. And if you can just fight the small fires that can spring up, you can probably protect a house. The firefighters themselves will often put themselves in a situation where they can protect houses.

One of the things that wildland firefighters do is they protect houses. So let's talk about planning. First, the things that you do will be helpful to physically protect your house, but the things that you do will also be helpful to encourage and invite other people, namely firefighters, to protect your house.

One thing I learned in researching it a year ago is that firefighters, wildland firefighters, have guidance on the houses that they can protect, and it's based upon how well the house is squared away. So if there's a fire and the firefighters are in a safe enough zone, and there are structures, the fire team will put firefighters at the house or on the property to try to fight any small fires that may be started, and they'll often do it with good success.

But there are certain risk factors that they look for. I looked up, when researching it, I looked up what's called the incident response pocket guide, the IRPG, which is passed out by the Forest Service to wildland firefighters. And in the very beginning of it, they give the firefighters the guidance to know whether or not they can decide that it's good for them to go ahead and defend a structure.

And here are some of the things that will help them to defend a structure if these things are not there, that they'll evaluate. They'll evaluate the access. So reading from the incident response pocket guide, it says, "If there are narrow roads, unknown bridge limits, and septic tank locations, that makes it hard for them to get their trucks and equipment in.

So make sure that your home has good access if possible. If there are ornamental plants and combustible debris that are sited next to the structure, that will discourage them because they know how much harder it is. But if you don't have ornamental plants and combustible debris next to the structure, they'll be willing to put resources into protecting and defending your home.

Wooden siding and/or wooden roof materials, that's a no-no. So go with the fire safe or fireproof siding materials. If the house has open vents, eaves, decks, or other ember traps, that's a hazard. And so that'll diminish their willingness and ability to stay and fight the fire. If the house has fuel tanks or hazardous materials around or power lines or limited water sources, those are all things that will discourage a firefighter from staying on and protecting the house simply because they know that the job is probably just too hard and they're not going to be able to do it.

But if those things are squared away, if your fire escaping and your fireproofing has been done in advance and that's squared away, then even just the firefighters themselves will be able to justify spending more resources on your property. That may help your property to be one that is not burned.

I want to wrap up this show, the third part of this show here with some information and advice from a couple of sources. Most of this is coming from firewise.org, an organization, Firewise USA, Residents Reducing Wildfire Risks by the NFPA, which I bet stands for the National Fire Prevention Association, although I did not confirm that.

But these are things that are simple. Go on firewise.org and you'll find all kinds of information and advice directly from those who know and want to keep your house from burning. But for example, for their homeowner checklist, this is important, reading from their homeowner checklist, "Wildfires don't have to destroy everything in their path.

Science and research have proven that using Firewise principles in your landscaping can minimize damage and prevent losses. The work you do today can make a difference. Follow these simple action steps now and throughout the year to prepare and help reduce the risk of your home and property becoming fuel for a wildfire.

Clear needles, leaves, and other debris from the roof, gutters, eaves, porches, and decks. This reduces the chance of embers igniting your home. To reduce ember penetration, replace or repair loose or missing roof shingles or tiles and caulk any gaps or openings on roof edges. Cover exterior attic vents and close under eave and soffit vents with metal wire mesh no larger than 1/8 inch to prevent embers from entering the home.

Remove items stored under decks or porches. Replace vegetation in these areas with rock or gravel. Replace mulch with hardscaping, including rock, gravel, or stone. If it can catch fire, don't let it touch your house, deck, or porch. Remove flammable items within 30 feet of all structures, including firewood piles, portable propane tanks, and dry and dead vegetation.

Dry grass and shrubs are fuel for wildfire, so keep your lawn hydrated and maintained. If it is brown, trim it to reduce fire intensity, and don't let debris and lawn cuttings linger. Dispose of these items quickly to reduce fuel for fire. Fire can spread to treetops. If you have tall trees on your property, prune low-hanging branches 6 to 10 feet from the ground, and for smaller trees, prune low-hanging branches to no more than a third of the tree's height.

Remove tall grasses, vines, and shrubs from under trees. Here are a few other suggestions for when there's actually a fire threatening from FireWise and then give you information of actually what to do during a fire. So what to do during watches or warnings of high fire danger from FireWise.

Make sure there's at least a 72-hour supply of important medications in your go-bag. Know which personal items, pictures, documents, etc. have been prioritized to take if time permits when evacuation is necessary. Remove deck or patio furniture, cushions, and doormats to prevent ember ignitions. Remove portable propane tanks from the deck or patio.

Know how to turn off the gas to the home. Place a ladder against the house for fire department use. Have your garden hoses connected for fire department use. Make sure windows, doors, and garage doors are closed. Make sure windows are closed on vehicles that will remain at the residence while you're evacuated.

And then I want to close by reading a couple of pages from a book called "Firescaping, Creating Fire-Resistant Landscapes, Gardens, and Properties in California's Diverse Environments." This is by an author named Douglas Kent. Eight bucks on Amazon. Ten left in stock order soon. Again, it's called "Firescaping." But here is a few pages from his information on what to actually do during a fire.

It is common to see individuals standing with a hose, watering their garden or roof during a wildfire. There are, however, many other chores that precede watering with a hose. In some cases, watering a roof is a poor use of time. Below are prioritized tasks for anyone defending their home against a wildfire.

In most situations, firefighters will ask everyone to leave the fire area. If they ask, do not hesitate to go. Protect yourself and others. Safely get all members and pets out of the house and away from the fire area. Get dressed for the fire. Put on wool or cotton pants, a long-sleeved shirt and a jacket.

Also, grab a pair of gloves, a handkerchief and goggles for added protection. Move and park cars off driveways and roadways so emergency vehicles can get by. Pack all irreplaceable items, such as photos, art, address books, bonds, stocks, birth certificates, and the stuff you'll need for a couple days away from the home, such as medications, toiletries, and a change of clothes.

Place all of this in the car. Make sure to roll all the windows up. Leave the doors unlocked and the keys in the ignition. Even if the roads become unusable, a car is a safe place for irreplaceable items. Fill as many containers as possible with drinking water. You'll need several bottles of water to quench your thirst and to keep the handkerchief around your face moist.

Pack valuables, such as jewelry and clothes, in weighted plastic bags and toss them into a pool or pond. Protect the inside of a home. Turn off the gas at the line leading to the house. Shut all doors and windows inside a house. Remove flammable drapes from windows. Close Venetian blinds and other non-flammable window coverings.

Close storm shutters. Close all attic, basement, and eave vents. Fill sinks and bathtubs with water. Place towels or rugs next to these indoor water reserves. The water reserves and towels can be used to extinguish flames within a structure. Turn on all the lights in a house. A smoke-filled house is difficult to see and navigate in.

Turn off fans and cooling systems. Leave all doors unlocked. In the fires of 2003, one fireman was seriously injured and another died trying to get into a house that was locked. Protect your pets. There are three options for pets during a wildfire. Flee with the owner, stay in a safe place while the owner fights the fire, or be stranded with no help.

Steps can be taken to increase the chances of survival in all three circumstances. Naturally, it is always safer for the owner and pet to flee a fire. Make sure the animal has an identification tag. Many emergency shelters refuse to take pets. It is important to know where you can safely drop yours off.

A network of family, friends, and some hotels should be prearranged. If you decide to fight the fire, place the pet in a familiar, safe, and secure spot, such as a car. Carry a photo of your pet for possible identification reasons. Grab a week's worth of food and medicine. If for any reason you have to flee without taking your pet, then uncage or unleash it.

Protect the outside of a home. Remove all combustible items from under and around the house. Examples include stored newspapers, firewood, furniture, and plants that have grown up and under a house. Place a ladder against the side of the house, creating easy access to the roof. Sweep and clean the roof of all ignitable material.

Clean obstacles such as patio furniture from around the house and put them inside the house or out in the yard. Hook up hoses to every water faucet around the house. Attach an adjustable nozzle at the end of each hose. Place shovels, rakes, and hose in a visible place. Place large, watertight cans and buckets around the house, then fill them with water.

Place towels and rugs next to the water buckets. If for some reason water becomes unavailable, these wet towels will help beat out small sparks and flames. Water combustible roofs now. To make the most of water's limited supply, stand below the roof and shoot water up into it. Unlike watering the roof from above, watering from below gets the water into the small cracks and crevices where sparks are likely to get caught without the excess water runoff.

With regard to any other suggestions, including property design suggestions, that is beyond my expertise. All I can do is point you in the right direction. If you are interested in the subject to protect your property, then there are resources available from people who are competent in that area to advise you.

From my limited reading, I am convinced that it is very possible to design a property to be protected from fire and that it's something that really we should do. I get very annoyed when we just do stupid stuff again and again and again and again, and we don't think about designing things intelligently.

And then disasters come and they have massive price tags, and we just say, "Oh, let's just do the same thing again and not apply a little bit of intelligent design to our circumstances." So let's not be those who perpetuate that cycle. Let's be those who work to properly protect our things, our own stuff, with good intelligent design.

Finally, with regard to financial resources, just be thankful and hopefully – just hope that your house is not an overly large portion of your investment portfolio. It's important that your home not be the only financial asset that you have. It can be very risky to have a house account for a very large percentage of your net worth.

If a fire comes through and destroys your house, it destroys it. It's far more risky than owning stock in hundreds and hundreds of companies that are dispersed in many industries all around the world. The stock is far less risky than having all of your money tied up in your personal house.

So that's important. It's also important that you make sure that you don't put yourself in a situation where your valuable physical property would all be destroyed if your home were destroyed. That's bad diversification strategy. That's bad planning. Don't keep all of your valuable physical personal property in your home.

Diversify it. Keep some of your valuable physical property in a safety deposit box or in a secondary backup location of some kind. Don't keep it all at home. My final comment is on the topic of insurance. California property insurance is out of my area of expertise. So I don't want to make any mistakes to comment on it much.

Just to know that I know that California does have unique risks and so those risks are reflected in California property insurance policies. If any of you listening are a California property insurance expert and would like to come on and talk about good insurance strategies for wildfire planning, I'd be happy to do that.

That would be great. But I will read to you a column from the Los Angeles Times titled As California Burns, Here's What You Need to Know About Fire Insurance. And I will encourage you to do a review with your property insurance agent when it's time and to carefully review these things in advance.

It's too late for the California homeowners to do anything with their insurance – home insurance. But it's not too late for you. So let me read you this column from the Los Angeles Times that gives some useful suggestions and that will close us out today. Most – author here is David Lazarus.

Most homeowners insurance policies cover fire damage. But heads up, that's not the whole story. If you live in a high-risk area such as near a canyon, you may need to pay more for additional coverage. And if a fire has devastated whole communities, such as what we're seeing now in Northern California, your home replacement dollars could be stretched thin as costs soar for everything from materials to labor.

All those commercials about insurance companies offering peace of mind when things like this happen, those are just ads, said Amy Bacht, executive director of United Policyholders, a San Francisco-based advocacy group. In reality, insurance policies are written by teams of lawyers and it can be rough for homeowners, she said.

Most homeowners insurance covers both your home and all property within. More than 90 percent of homeowners buy coverage, according to recent estimates, and as many as 40 percent of renters purchase insurance for their belongings. After the recent drought turned California into a huge pile of kindling, insurers racked up billions of dollars in fire-related claims.

Some, such as Allstate, stopped writing new policies. Others, such as Farmers and State Farm, became choosier about homes they'd cover. The insurance industry says it's ready to handle claims from the fires now raging statewide. "Insurers will 100 percent be there for homeowners," said Nicole Ganley, a spokeswoman for the Western Region of the Property Casualty Insurers Association of America, a trade group.

"Insurers are moving very quickly to help policyholders." Be that as it may, coverage may not always be easy to obtain. Homeowners in high-risk areas who can't find coverage in the open market may have to turn to a state-sponsored program called the California FAIR plan. FAIR covers up to $1.5 million for a structure and its contents, which in some cases won't be enough for full replacement of a lost home and property.

If there's one takeaway from the blazes now causing widespread damage in the Golden State, it's for homeowners and renters to make sure their coverage is up to date, and that nothing sneaky has made its way into your policy. Narbe Shervanian, a Glendale lawyer who handles fire-related claims, said it's not unheard of for an insurer to change the terms of a policy during the renewal process.

"It might be disclosed," he said, "but let's be honest, nobody really reads all this stuff." As a result, you may find that you're shouldering more of the risk than you originally thought. Shervanian also warned of seemingly arbitrary responses to fire claims. If his structure burns down, then all legitimate insurance claims will be honored.

But what if there's a wildfire nearby and your home is impacted by smoke and ash? Will your homeowners' coverage pay for the cleanup? "We're seeing issues with smoke and ash damaging homes and insurance companies playing games," Shervanian said. "One year they do one thing, one year they do something else." It's very important as the economy recovers from the Great Recession to be mindful of rising property values.

Yes, that's great from a "maybe I'll sell" perspective. From a fire perspective, it can be a whole other thing. Replacement costs you locked in for your insurance policy may no longer reflect current conditions, meaning you may have to reach into your own pocket to make yourself whole. Also, widespread fire damage will be felt in the market in the form of rising costs for materials such as wood and concrete and almost certainly higher labor costs as contractors take advantage of supply and demand situations.

A smart idea is to pay a little extra for what's known as an extended replacement cost endorsement. This is basically additional coverage intended to accommodate at least a portion of any unexpected cost increases. You can also purchase a additional coverage for code upgrades. For example, the rules might have changed for electrical systems or insulation since your house was built.

Code upgrade insurance will protect you from so-called "betterments" that your basic policy might not address. Insurance companies have had enough experience with fires in California to do a good job of resolving claims, said Bok at United Policyholders. But that's still not always the case. I strongly advise homeowners and renters to take their smartphones and walk around their homes shooting a video of their belongings.

This can provide helpful evidence if an insurer disputes, say, that you owned a state-of-the-art home theater setup. If you have to evacuate, save all receipts. Many homeowner policies include so-called "ale coverage" as in additional living expenses (ALE) which will include costs such as hotel rooms, food, and rentals. So there are some useful suggestions from a Los Angeles Time column from a couple of days ago.

I've thrown a lot of information at you. I did my best to make it useful to you, but I definitely threw a lot of information at you with a little bit of repetition. I guess my closing thoughts that I'd like to leave you with are these. Thinking about any...

Each type of event has some kind of commonality. And it's important to consider what those commonalities are. For example, when it comes to... And I think all of us should think through what are our own most likely personal disasters that we might face. For me, what I consider to be one of the most likely personal disasters would be a home fire.

Just simply a simple home fire catches my house on fire and I gotta get out. And so in one way, that's exactly the... That's the thing that I need to think through and plan for. But a hurricane has a very similar risk profile in terms of I have more warning, but I still need to do similar types of things.

I still need to be able to get out. And another likely disaster would be something like a burglary. Somebody breaks in and steals things from my house that are important to me. Well, some things I do are common among all of these things. If I have my important insurance and financial paperwork backed up on secure drives that are outside of the house that are in secure locations, then no matter whether that's a home fire, a hurricane, or a burglary, I'm helped by all of those things.

Or another likely disaster that I think is worth planning for is as the parent of small children, I am concerned about the abduction of my children. Well, how do you plan for that? One thing you do is you take a photograph of your children and make sure that you have a photograph in case your child is abducted or just simply goes missing.

We don't have to put the criminal element on it. They just go missing and they wander off. Then to make sure that I have a photograph and that photograph is readily available to be passed along to emergency crews who are helping me to search for my child. I need the same exact thing for a fire.

So when you start thinking through these scenarios, think them through and what you find is there are common steps that are common in all of them. And as you start to do it, you'll start to realize that the things you do to prepare for one scenario are very similar to the things you do to prepare for another scenario.

With hurricane planning, you don't put big trees next to your house, just like with fire planning. With hurricane planning, you build a strong metal roof, just like fire planning. I'm out of music. I'm going to be done here. But it's a hope that you see – that's why I wanted to address this.

I hope that you see that as you start to think through these things, it's not insurance that solves the problem. Insurance has a place. But insurance is only one hammer in your toolbox. And it's not the best hammer because when you're trying to escape from the wildfire, it doesn't give you a whole lot of comfort to know that your home insurance is paid up.

You're trying to protect life. The home insurance policy comes in after the fact. We're out of music. I'll just close with this. If this has been useful for you, if this information has been helpful and you'd like to support the work that I'm doing, please come by RadicalPersonalFinance.com/patron. Sign up as a supporting patron, RadicalPersonalFinance.com/patron.

And don't forget to go to Bombfell.com/rpf. Again, B-O-M-B-F-E-L-L.com/rpf. This show is part of the Radical Life Media network of podcasts and resources. Find out more at RadicalLifeMedia.com. Hey, parents. Join the LA Kings on Saturday, November 25th for an unforgettable kids' day presented by Pear Deck. Family fun, giveaways and exciting Kings hockey awaits.

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