a1abdj said:
Small amounts of valuables are OK in a gun safe. Once you start exceeding the $20,000 mark (all contents combined), you need to choose your safe a bit more carefully. In many cases it makes better sense to buy a less expensive, larger gun safe for the few guns. Then you can buy a smaller, properly rated safe for the valuables.
Now that's brilliant!
Instead of spending a ton of dough on a 'real' safe big enough for a big collection of long guns and important papers and some real valuables, like jewelry (I don't have much of that, by the way), maybe the answer is to get a 'decent', large, 10-gauge gun safe with moderate security and insulating properties, and then get a real burglary-rated and UL rated fire safe--much smaller volume, for the important stuff.
Makes real economic sense, too, since you can get a fairly economical real burglary and fire rated safe in smaller size. All my guns probably total up to less than $10,000. Maybe closer to $8,000. I have real concerns for a much smaller volume of stuff, namely important paperwork for kids born overseas, wife's citizenship papers, my discharge papers, old photographs, and some valuables (less than the gun values) and emotionally important momentos.
If I took all my important papers and momentos out of the Liberty Lincoln I have now and got a quality, used, small true UL burglary and UL fire rated safe for the papers and the lower dollar value, but more important stuff, I'd be well protected and money ahead as opposed to getting a very big true UL rated burglary and fire box to store it
all in. After taking all that stuff out of the left side of my Liberty I could get my unprotected, but relatively modestly valued rifles in the freed up space.
There's a tradeoff here between real versus perceived security and fire needs and size of the box, isn't there? If I separate my stuff into two categories and protect them appropriately, that makes a lot more sense than trying to load a big volume of less important stuff into the same box with the really important stuff and demanding high security and fire protection on the big box. Six foot tall, 4 foot wide UL rated burglary and fire protection is prohibitively expensive, and probably not needed.
a1abdj, you're steering me away from selling my old, 10-gauge Liberty Lincoln (PITA) and getting a nice BF-7240 and toward Keeping my current gun safe and getting a smaller, used true burglary and fire rated safe. Get all my guns in the Liberty (which really is pretty and has a nice green automotive finish that the wife likes because it matches our study), and get all the other stuff that I never really fiddle with out of the left side of my Liberty and put it in the basement in a real safe.
You, sir, are brilliant! I am shifting my thinking entirely.