Organize Your Financial Paper Series: Use the documents gathered for filing your income tax return in Part 1 to prepare for emergency in Part 2, to set financial goals and plan ahead in Part 3. Part 4 helps you build a budget. What happens if you find yourself without any of the paper work that proves you are who you say you are? That proves you own your car, house and furniture? That gives you access to money and financial resources? That connects you to medical care? Lack of documentation was one of the biggest obstacles in managing life for survivors of Hurricane Katrina. Wildfires, floods, hurricanes, mud slides are only some of the causes of quick evacuation with very little warning. What would you grab if you had fifteen minutes to leave and did not know if ... [Read More]
Organizing Your Financial Papers Series
Organize Your Financial Life Part 2 — I.C.E.
Whenever we travel by car, Wheels adds a pair of rubber boots to the cargo. Weather insurance, he says. If he has them along, it won’t rain. You have to know their twisted sense of humor to get the laugh out of that statement that he and Bytes do – but it has worked! Wheels has never had to wear those boots. Our topic today is like the “boots in the trunk”. No guarantee of sunny weather but you’ll be prepared – and everyone hopes those preparations are never needed. In the first post in this series, I told you we would use the information gathered for tax purposes for several other things as well. First of all, that nice neat pile of tax papers from that post is going I.C.E. In. Case. of Emergency. Most of us, if traveling for a year, would likely leave ... [Read More]