It happened again.

Just a year after Tropical Storm Irene and an October nor'easter delivered a one-two punch to my shoreline New England community, superstorm Sandy provided a knockout blow.

Many people lost their homes. Some lost their lives. I'm grateful that the worst we endured was a few downed trees and a four-day power outage.

But this time, as Sandy came barreling up the East Coast, I finally began to confront some record-keeping issues that had long bedeviled me: namely, how to safeguard our financial documents, what records to have at the ready if we're ever forced to evacuate and how to reconstruct documents lost in a disaster.

As we hadn't done anything to protect the bulk of our records before Sandy made landfall, I defaulted to Plan B—assembling an emergency financial kit, of sorts, to get us through the storm and its immediate aftermath.

Turns out I was on the right track.

"I can't think of anything that can't be re-created other than personal mementos," Michael Goodman, president of Wealthstream Advisors, an accounting and financial planning firm in New York, told me later. While documents such as tax returns and wills usually can be restored eventually, he says, what you really want at your fingertips are the items that will allow you to "keep the engine running" if you get forced out of your home.

This includes cash and a checkbook, says Eric Rigby, an accountant and financial adviser in New Orleans, who found himself scrambling for temporary checks after Hurricane Katrina displaced his family from their home for "probably the most stressful eight weeks of our lives."

Here's what I did:

After restocking the house with food, bottled water and fresh batteries, gassing up the car and getting cash, I hastily gathered paper copies of all our latest financial statements and household bills—including the ones from our electric company, homeowners insurer and credit-card companies—and stuffed them in a plain manila folder. Then I placed the folder on a desk in the kitchen beside a land-line telephone.

Fortunately, we never had to evacuate, but my decidedly low-tech emergency kit still came in handy. When the power went out, we quickly found a phone number for our electric company and called (on the land-line phone) to report the outage. This beat stumbling around in the dark to locate the number.

And when one of our trees fell into our neighbor's yard, we just as quickly found a phone number for our insurance company. No, we didn't have a copy of the insurance policy in hand, just our policy number, but the woman on the other end of the phone was able to tell us what was covered (our tree falling on our property) and what wasn't (our tree falling on our neighbor's property).

As more bad luck would have it, a couple of credit-card bills came due while we were still in the dark. Calls to the credit-card companies resulted in waived late fees and interest charges, a pleasant surprise.

If the storm had rendered our house uninhabitable—either temporarily or permanently—we could have immediately notified all our service providers, including the phone and cable companies, so they could stop billing us right away.

A little gallows storm humor here: My friend Mary was forced to evacuate her home before Sandy hit. She returned recently to find her waterlogged house still without power—and a crisp, new electric bill waiting for her in the mailbox. "They can't get the power back on," she deadpanned, "but they sure manage to get their bills out on time."

Here's what's on my to-do list:

I plan to make digital and paper copies of important documents—including bank and brokerage account statements, insurance policies, birth certificates, passports and the like—and store them in a secure location or locations a fair distance from home.

We have a safe-deposit box at a local bank, but I'll probably choose someplace farther afield to limit the chances of the same disaster destroying all the copies. Online data storage is an option, but having experienced what it's like to have no Internet service for nearly a week, I'll likely use that option in addition to, not instead of, personal backup drives and plain old paper.

For a list of which records to copy, including those that belong in an emergency kit, check out the disaster-preparedness publication on the site of the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants,

For tips on how to replace important documents lost in a disaster, go to the financial recovery page on the American Red Cross website,