This week I’m talking about organizing your financial documents.

So far this week, I've been talking about creating an inventory of assets, accounts, and a list of trusted contacts. Taking action on each of these items isn’t a time-consuming endeavor, and it will give you the boost of motivation you need to keep going down the path of organizing your financial documents.

As you begin the task of going through your files and getting everything organized, it’s important to pause and decide what organizational system will work best for you to keep all of your financial documents organized.

As a type A, OCD kinda person, with a former professional organizer as my mother, I know a thing or two about organizing things. In middle school, I used to rearrange the furniture in my room when I was a kid, because I thought it was fun. I would do this several times a year, just to experiment with what setup I liked the most. I would usually do this late at night when I couldn’t sleep and was bored. My parents must have been wondering what the heck was wrong with me - making all that racket at midnight.

Even prior to that when I was still playing with barbies, my favoirte thing to do was stage my barbie mansion and move furniture around, instead of actually playing with my Barbies.

I’m getting off topic here, but the point is that some of us like myself need order and organization, and many of us live in chaos and disarray, especially when it comes to our paper clutter. But it’s really important no matter how you’re wired, that you figure out a way to keep those important financial keeper documents organized in a way that makes sense both for you and your loved ones.

With that in mind, there are 3 main organizational systems that work well for financial documents:

1. A binder system - visual and convenient, it also forces you to keep your files from expanding, unless you want to keep buying more binders.
2. Files and a filing cabinet - also visual, but you must be consistent in your labeling to ensure that your filing system works well
3. Scan and file - ah, ok - I am technically a millennial, so I like the idea of scanning documents. The beauty of the scanning system is that you can store and find information quickly, while getting rid of all the papers you have! A win-win!

You’ll want to adopt the method that works for you, before embarking on organizing your documents.

That’s it for today, thanks for listening. Tomorrow, we’re going to recap the week and I’m gonna give you a little taste of next week’s theme.

My name is Ashley Micciche and this is the One Minute Retirement Tip.

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