When my sweet mother-in-law passed away in April of this year, I watched and made some mental notes of ALL the paperwork and activity that comes with the death and estate business of a loved one.
Of course, I was not directly involved with all of that, but my husband and his older sister were, so it was spread out on our dining room table for a few weeks as things were processed and completed.
Let me just say there were A LOT of "T's" to cross and "I's" to dot, and without careful pre-organization, it would have been a nightmare.
It made me really think about what our children would face if something were to happen to us.
It especially made me think about what hubby would face if something were to happen to me. You see, I take care of all the finances and "paperwork" stuff in our household.
I didn't want anyone to become overwhelmed, so I went to work...
I started by gathering all of the "stuff" that has been in different locations throughout hubby's office.
Things like mortgage papers, insurance policies, financial documents, appliance manuals, IRS documents, etc...
You name it, I gathered it into one very tall pile and placed it on our dining room table.
It was not a pretty sight.
In fact, there was so much individual paperwork to weed through that I decided to just do a little bit each day, making piles that were relative to a specific topic and made sense in the overall idea of organizing this stuff.
Here's the "organization" mid-process.
I had at one point organized things into different 3-ring binders, but that was not very efficient. Too many binders were a clutter and didn't make overall sense to anyone other than me.
If I was "gone," it would have been a real struggle for someone else to get a good sense of what needed to happen and where that piece of needed paperwork was located.
This initial attempt at a "rough organization" did two things:
1. Loosely organized what was important to keep
2. Teased out what could be shredded
3. Separated things like appliance manuals from important docs
Slowly but surely, the "mess" that once was the dining room table started to look better and bit more organized.
I was not about to get excited at this point.
I knew that this was not the "light at the end of the tunnel" moment by any means.
It was simply a way to remove unnecessary papers from important ones.
At this point, I would recommend you have two items in your home.
A good quality shredder AND a blackout roller.
A shredder is important for reducing documents that have A LOT of personal information throughout the page (Think old mortgages and 8+-year-old tax returns). A roller is great for blacking out a few lines of personal information (utility bills and credit card offers).
We've always had a shredder. In this day and age of identity theft, even having an account number along with your address can open you up and make you vulnerable to cyber theft.
You want to avoid making it easy for cybercriminals to get as much of your information as possible.
Is it full-proof? NOPE. But it does go a long way in giving you some peace of mind that you are doing all you can to help yourself before you need the help and expense of experts.
Once everything was semi-organized, I turned to the piles that would be needed documents and began fine-tuning their organization.
I knew that I wanted to put our different types of insurances into one single binder.
As retirees, we both have different types of insurances from our previous jobs as well as personal insurances from an independent source.
Our children would not know who or where to go for these payouts if something were to happen to us and they were in charge of our estate(s).
I made sure to list each one in its own zippered folder.
I found these zippered, 3-ring folders at BJ's, but here is a similar set as well.
I used my label maker to identify the contents of each folder for ease of use.
I labeled the outside and spine of this notebook as well. It holds only our insurances and information related to such.
After this one was organized, I proceeded with the same method for the other two categories I identified.
This is my individual health insurance through the military.
I wanted to keep it separate as I use this for anything related to my health insurance.
The last one was financial information, including all our banking and personal finances.
All of that paperwork was reduced into this...
Three notebooks that carry a wealth of information in the event that hubby or our children need it. They are easy to update and make needed changes.
We have them stored in a secure place so they are protected.
It's peace of mind for me as well as them, and it feels so good to have it all organized and making "sense."
It's a rule that everyone should put into practice.
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