Best Results Organizing

As part of our 2024 refresh of classic posts and essential concepts in paper organizing, we’ve already looked at the what it’s time to let go of, the basic tools for creating a working filing system, and the first three categories of my approach to a personal or family filing system.

In today’s post, we look at the last two elements of the system.

• Financial
• Legal
• Medical
• Household
• Personal

With each of these categories, there are times when a paper, digital, or hybrid approach is the optimal solution.

For financial documents, I encouraged establishing a baseline paper system for building skills in financial management; digital storage is a fine adjunct to that once you have a handle on your money and the related activities. For legal papers, digital storage provides a solid backup, but for your most vital documents, you will need to access the originals. 

Last week as we saw with medical documents, paper and digital complement each other, depending on where you need to access the information as well as an individual’s adeptness with apps and software.

Those first three are the most “official” types of documents. If you don’t have access to financial or legal information, it can cause troubles with your credit history or the IRS, lead to you losing property, or even land you in jail. The consequences of not having medical information can range from inconvenient to life-threatening.

Happily, our final two categories are less fraught. Maintaining household papers helps you save money, reduce friction when seeking solutions, and provide quick answers. Meanwhile, an orderly system for personal papers helps generated a biographical history of you and your family members and develop a repository of personal research. Done well, you can avoid piles of random papers.

HOUSEHOLD FILES

You may be pretty proud of how you’ve managed your financials, but if you’re like most people, your household papers are strewn across a series of drawers, a cabinet in the kitchen, or an unlabeled hanging folder.

I get it. It’s probably easier for you to envision when and how you’d need financial — and maybe legal and medical — information. But household papers, while straightforward, can be wide-ranging, and shouldn’t be the paperwork equivalent of a junk drawer.

Be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home, and while your home-related papers don’t often shout for attention, they need love.

House drawing created with Microsoft Bing Image Creator

Household Inventory

Both reasons to keep a household inventory require anticipating unpleasantness, so it’s no wonder people avoid the task. 

If your house was the victim of a 100-year flood or if robbers made off with your possessions like thieves in the night (or, the way my car was stolen, in broad daylight!), would you be able to itemize your losses to the insurance company? Unless you live as modestly as a monk, you probably need a household inventory, something that identifies all the non-trivial items in the home and their value.

The other situation is no less vexing. When a marriage dissolves, the proceedings require both members of the couple creating a marital asset list. This involves not only financial assets like bank and retirement accounts (as well as liabilities, like debts and mortgages), but also tangible assets, like your Grandma’s couch, his replica of the Stanley Cup (not these Stanley cups), and the antique table you bought together.

While a marital asset list requires more complexity than a standard inventory (specifying how it came how it was acquired, whether prior to the marriage, as a gift or bequest, or as jointly-purchased property), it builds on the information in the version for insurance purposes.

Home Inventory Basics

While a future post will review the finer points of creating a household inventory, there are some basic steps to follow.

• Pair up with your spouse, friend, or a professional organizer so that one person is moving clockwise around the room, not skipping anything, while the other transcribes the information.
• Consider furniture, wall hangings and free-standing decor, electronics, china, silver, crystal, jewelry, clothing, books, music, and personal effects. Note large furniture/items first, then deal with visible decor, then possessions inside of cabinets and drawers.
• Log a possession’s name or description; brand name, artist, or designer, its place of origin or how you came to own it, the general date of acquisition/purchase, and the price you paid. (To start, just log what you have; the rest can be filled in later.) Note where in the house the item is regularly kept.
• Go room-by-room, identifying and logging possessions. 

The fastest method is to type it into a spreadsheet like Excel or Google sheets; if you hunt and peck, and can’t type faster than you handwrite, then designate your inventory partner to be the scribe while you circumnavigate the room.

Create a digital inventory file in the computer (backed up to the cloud), but print a copy for your paper files. (Most clients like to keep a copy of their printed home inventory at the front of their Household files section. You may want to put an additional copy behind your homeowner’s or renter’s insurance policy, in the Financial files.) When you sell or acquire something new, or replace a broken or outmoded item, mark it on the paper copy and just update the digital copy periodically. 

An auxiliary photographic inventory can support your written one. This can range from something as simple as taking photos from a few different angles in your studio apartment and saving them to an “inventory” album in your phone’s photo app to doing a methodical photographic inventory of every piece of art, furniture, and fine jewelry.

The effort you expend should be proportional to the value of your possessions; nobody needs a photo of your curling iron or your wobbly thrift-store shoe rack.

If you decide to keep a combined written and photographic inventory, look at a spreadsheet/database hybrid like Airtable, which is free for up to 1 GB of attachments per base, and 1000 records per base. 

There are also apps to make inventorying your space easier, including Encircle, Sortly, Memento Database, the National Association of Insurance Commissioners’ home inventory app, and more. We’ll discuss these in great detail in a future post.

Beyond the household

Your household inventory extends beyond your physical home. Remember to log your other spaces, such as:

• Backyard sheds or storage pods
• College dorm rooms (and summer storage if they don’t bring everything home)
• College students’ off-campus apartments
• Off-site storage units (in town, and any you maintain in other cities)
• Anything on your boat (or, if you’re a fancy-pants type, your jet)
• Time-shares
• AirB&B/Venmo properties, second homes, holiday cottages, and other real estate

After you complete your inventories — and it will probably take many sessions to gather all of the information needed — don’t forget to confer with your insurance agent to make sure you’re covered for the replacement value if you suffered losses. You may need to increase overall coverage or add insurance riders for individual pieces.

Home Maintenance Records

Whatever you do to your house likely would benefit from you capturing information about your house. Home maintenance records include:

• Seasonal household maintenance schedule
• Contact list of all the household helpers you use, from cleaners and plumbers to the people who clear your gutters, repair your roof, sweep your chimney.
• Service provider folders — If you have regularly scheduled services, whether indoors, like for pest removal, or outdoors, like lawn care or snow plowing, keep a folder for each company. 
• List/description of your home’s light bulbs for under-cabinets, in-ceiling lights, and garage and/or outdoor lights. Don’t count on memory to know what base and light type goes where. (This is a lovely parting gift to pass along to anyone who buys your home!)
• Battery record — Keep a running list of what battery sizes everything in your home needs. Remotes take AA and AAA; toys and gadgets require C, D, and 9-volt; cordless phones use 2.4-volt batteries; personal medical equipment (like diabetes glucose meters) use flat button-style batters, like 2032s. Each time you buy something that requires batteries, log the battery size here. 
• Family emergency plans and escape routes — Check Paper Doll Organizes You To Prepare for an Emergency for ideas on what to track.
• Fusebox/Circuit Breaker map — Over time, the labels on your fusebox start to fade. While you should refresh the writing, it’s helpful to have a chart or map to make sure you know what maps to what.
• Trouble-shooting notes — When your toilet glugs or your sump pump whistles or something goes awry, write down what the experts tell you to do so you’ll prepared the next time!

Depending on the size and nature of your home, this section might require multiple interior file folders in a few hanging folders, or you might prefer to create a 3-ring binder with sections for each for easy access by a babysitter or house sitter. 

Auto Maintenance Records

Even if you only ever use one mechanic shop and they keep computerized records of all maintenance to your car, storing accurate records helps you financially.

Toy Car Photo by Atish Sewmangel on Unsplash

If your car’s manufacturer issues a recall or technical service bulletin, searchable at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, you may be able to recoup money you’ve already paid for repairs. Additionally, if you sell your car privately, prospective owners are more inclined to buy cars with a diligently maintained service history. Maintain:

• Service records — Every time you get an oil change or have a repair done, you should receive a printout of what work was done, on what date, at what mileage. Whether repairs are to the engine or the body work, be sure to request documentation.
• Purchases — Keep records of all purchases for your car, such as tires, batteries and windshield wipers. 
• Size list — Unless you naturally remember what size tires or windshield wipers your car needs, writing this down somewhere will make life easier when you’re shopping. 
• Mileage records — While not essential, if you do maintain mileage records for purposes other than tax deductions (like monitoring your gas efficiency), keep these here.

Don’t just crumple these papers in your glove compartment! Use interior folders for each category in one auto maintenance hanging folders. You may also want to keep a binder with copies of major purchase records (tires, engine parts, batteries, etc.) in your glove compartment or under the seat in case you need to replace an item under warranty while traveling.

Manuals for Assembly, Installation, Maintenance, and Repair

Do you speak Spanish and Japanese? Do you speak them fluently enough to reprogram your DVR or follow instructions for setting up your Wi-Fi network? If you aren’t fluent in the language in which the manual is written, say domo arigato for the service it has provided and arrivederci before recycling it!

If you don’t still own the thing, you don’t need the manual! If you give donate to charity or sell it in a yard sale, provide the instruction manual; if you throw the item away, toss the manual!

Households have a lot of appliances and random stuff. You may have manuals for:

• Major appliances like your furnace, refrigerator, washer/dryer, etc. 
• Small kitchen, household, and personal appliances for blenders and toasters, humidifiers or vacuums, or hair dryers — Once you’ve owned the item a month or so, do you really need the instructions? If you can’t make toast, perhaps organizing shouldn’t be super-high on your priorities right now.
• Electronics, including audiovisual/entertainment devices, computer hardware, and software 
• Toys and gadgets
• Furniture — If the manual tells you how to put something together or install it and you won’t ever be disassembling or uninstalling it, the manual may not be particularly useful to you.

A note about warranties

Most warranties aren’t worth the paper they are printed on. They’re either of short duration such that the products all die the day after the warranty expires or you have to jump through so many hoops to ship the product for repair that you’ll probably buy a replacement and not bother. If you decide a warranty is worth keeping, be sure to register the product (per the instructions) and then attach the warranty to the manual.

Organizing the manuals

If you have ample filing space, an interior folder for each of the above categories should suffice, though if any of your manuals are hefty, you might want a few folders for extended categories; if a lot of the manuals are “fat,” you might need quite a few hanging folders. Don’t overstuff!

SURPRISE: Instruction manuals don’t have to live in your regular personal or family file system! 

Depending on the number and nature of the appliances in your home, you might use a three-ring binder with all of the kitchen appliance manuals (in sheet protectors). Don’t waste valuable kitchen counter space; just tuck the binder somewhere accessible, like the cabinet above your stove exhaust. Keep hardware and software manuals in magazine holders on the bookshelf nearest your computer.

It’s tempting to keep any paper related to your home just in case, but that leads to clutter. Ask yourself:

Why/when would I need this paper? 

What’s the worst that could happen if I no longer had this manual? Most manuals are available online. When Paper Mommy bought a new TV last year, there was no paper manual, so we just Googled the make and model, and found the instructions online.

Check these classic Paper Doll posts for advice on downsizing and organizing your manuals:

• Paper Doll’s Manual Override – Part 1: Declutter and Organize Owner’s Manuals
• Paper Doll’s Manual Override – Part 2: Twelve Resources To Find An Owner’s Manual
• Paper Doll’s Manual Override – Part 3: Create & Organize A Digital Owner’s Manual Library

YouTube is full of helpful videos, and web sites offering online user and repair manuals, like Fix It Now, SkillCat Appliance Manual Lookup Tool, and User’s Manual Guide abound.

There are also apps for finding digital versions of manuals, like The Lost Manual, which you can browse by brand or item category. 

Decorating/Remodeling Plans 

If all those HGTV remodeling shows give you joy, make room in your filing system for:

• Project notes and plans for decorating and/or remodeling
• Project budgets
• Swatches of upholstery and paint samples
• Receipts — Generally, all receipts go in the Financial files. However, once the current tax year has passed, if these receipts don’t fit your “big ticket item” file needs, they may still be useful for identifying where you purchased items you might need repaired, replaced, or augmented. 

Gardening Records

Are you an out-of-doors person? Paper Doll is decidedly in-of-doors. However, if your yard includes plants, shrubbery, or heirloom flowers or you have a vegetable garden for which you need to maintain adequate rotation records year-after-year, make a few interior folders for a gardening  hanging folder. (Digital files or apps are equally fine. This is a low-stress category!)

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PERSONAL FILES

We are all guilty of keeping excess personal papers out of habit. Maybe some secret part of us imagines we’ll be asked to provide resources for our biographers someday? Perhaps we fear our memories will fail in our later years. (But will memories of having earned Most Valuable Player in 8th grade soccer matter to us in our 80s?) Paper Doll won’t judge you, but make things easy on yourself and those who will come after by making your personal files orderly.

Break down your family’s Personal section by individual (just as we did last week for Medical); each person’s records are divided into items of personal history and personal interest. If your entire family has specific activities or pursuits (like attending your house of worship or planning an annual family reunion), create a “family” section as if the collective family were an additional family member.

Personal History

These represent who you were and are. Each sub-category can generally go into its own interior folder.

Educational History

The older you are, the less important these documents become for use in the outside world; it’s up to you to determine how much you value them for personal use. 

• Academic transcripts
• Standardize test scores (SAT or ACT, GRE, GMAT, LSAT, MCAT)
• Letters of recommendations from professors or academic mentors
• Select academic papers — If you have your diploma, I encourage you to toss anything that doesn’t make your heart sing. Unless you wrote a brilliant blue book essay or world renowned paper, only keep what bolsters your self-esteem (and only until you no longer feel the need for extrinsic rewards).
• Continuing education credits or certificates
• Your senior or graduate thesis (If it’s bound and published, display it on your bookshelves or coffee table. Great job!)

Toddler Graduate created with Microsoft Bing Image Creator

Professional History

The longer you have been in your profession, and particularly the longer you have been out of a the workplace altogether, the less you need. Keep whatever records your profession requires; for everything else, pare things down to just what is truly meaningful. These may include:

• Licenses and/or certifications — Only keep expired ones if your profession or insurance requires proof of prior licensing.
• Resumes — Modern resumes are designed to be read by algorithms and are so different from what GenX or Boomers recall. Your LinkedIn is probably more accurate. Keep only what allows you to identify dates and locations. 
• Professional letters of recommendation or of gratitude from clients, customers, superiors, or vendors. (Again, this is just for warming your heart.)
• Citations of bravery or success
• Newspaper clippings (but not the entire newspaper or section) noting your professional successes, wisdom, or acumen.

Military History

Basic military service records go in the VIP section of your legal paperwork; things like your separation paperwork allow you to prove your service record and collect VA and financial benefits. 

However, your military history also includes the more personal records of your time in the service. You may choose to maintain:

• Enlistment records
• Training and qualification records
• Copies of your military separation papers (the originals will be with your VIPs)
• Citations, decorations, and awards, along with copies of written references submitted in support of you earning them. 
• Letters of commendation
• Correspondence regarding replacement of medals

Toddler Navy created with Microsoft Bing Image Creator