had a conversation with someone about how they needed to clean up all their paperwork in the event that something should happen to them… currently they are sorting through boxes of a parent’s documents…

got me thinking about my folder in the filing cabinet which is titled “when mom dies“… sounds a bit maudlin, but when I was searching through many filing cabinet drawers for all of the information that I needed when George died, it made me realize that the more I got organized for the girls, the easier it would be on them…

in that folder are things like my birth certificate, marriage certificate, a few pictures from when I was younger, copy of my will, power of attorney, health directive, with some information about George as well…

they know who my financial advisor is, and my accountant, and between those two they will be able to sort out all the money stuff…

but it was those other bits and pieces that were difficult to find and gather into one place…

George and I hand wrote our wills when the girls were very small and we were heading off together on a plane trip and wanted to have something written down in case we didn’t get home safely…

after that we didn’t think about the wills again… when he died I knew exactly where the will should be, but couldn’t find it for weeks… not a huge problem, as everything was coming to me as his spouse, but at one point the credit union was insistent on having a copy of the will to set up an estate account…

I had searched the house over trying to find that darn will and eventually I discovered it at the back of the drawer where I knew it should have been…

then there was the (sort of) funny part where the young person at the credit union wasn’t sure they could accept a hand-written will as she had never seen one… I knew it was legal from my time working in a law office, but it was very stressful for the three or four days it took the credit union to accept it… the reason we needed an Estate account was that the cheques that were arriving were all made out to the Estate of and couldn’t be cashed if they weren’t in an Estate account… red tape can make a person see red sometimes, lol…

both George and I thought all our stuff was organized and clear but I discovered that wasn’t really the case… since then I have recommended to all my friends that they have the hard conversations with their husbands and families and make sure that everything is accessible and all decisions have been discussed by families…

must go and check out that folder and see if there is anything else that needs to get popped into it…

and do some more shredding so that the kids don’t have an enormous task ahead of them at a time when they will already be under tremendous stress…

preparing isn’t just an Advent thing, lol..

trees on the stairway – from a very organized Christmas box…