The Joys of Moving

September 05, 2011

When was the last time you moved?  Were you amazed at the amount of “stuff” you have?  I am moving this weekend (from a five bedroom three bath home to a condo about half the size) and I am shocked at how much stuff is coming out of my house.  I found that I have not one, not two, but seven cameras!  There is an old Minolta manual 35mm film camera with a bunch of lenses (I’ll keep that one), a Canon 35mm film camera, and a bunch of point and shoot digital cameras (which we don’t really use anymore since we use the cameras on our phones every day).

You know what that means don’t you?  It means we are horders!  Not bad enough to be on the TV show, but certainly when we get something new, we hold onto the old.  We put it in a drawer or closet instead of selling it or donating it to charity.  You can imagine the theme carries through in other areas beyond camera hording – the paperwork is endless.  I had twenty years of tax returns, and stacks of old investment statements for accounts I closed years ago.  My husband always praised me for being organized – they were all neatly filed in filing cabinets.  However, I no longer needed the tax returns (after seven years) and the investment statements (since the accounts were closed and the taxes already reported on them), so having beautifully organized files of things I don’t need doesn’t make much sense.

Moving forces you to make decisions.  You have to ask yourself, “Is this worth boxing up and taking it with me to my new location?”  Normally, I just can’t see myself on a beautiful Saturday morning choosing to go through my file cabinets in the garage instead of going swimming or for a hike, so it never got done.  There aren’t any real negative consequences of having seven cameras, except taking up a small amount of closet space.  But there can be consequences of having extraneous paperwork and files everywhere.

Even though, as a financial planner, I thought I was very diligent, I found some mistakes. 

These are common mistakes that can easily be made when someone isn’t paying enough attention:

The wrong beneficiary.  I found that I still had my father (he’s 81) as the beneficiary on an old IRA account that I had before I moved here.  That has been changed to my husband.

Misfiled life insurance policies.  Even though I have a life insurance file with the polices and a complete  list of everything including the company name and policy numbers in my office, there were two of my older policies in the file cabinet in the garage.  Why they weren’t with the others, I don’t know!  They weren’t secret policies.  Isn’t the whole point of life insurance is to care for your loved ones when you aren’t around?  I guess I thought it would be “fun” to make them work for it by going through every piece of paper in the house (and the garage) to find the policies.

Saving too many things.  I think the biggest problem was just saving too much–not the necessary things but everything.  For example, I really only need the comprehensive year end statement for investments and not every monthly or quarterly statement, unless I made a trade and needed it to record the basis information.  It also makes it harder to review when bogged down by paperwork.  Having a binder of annual statements makes the analysis much easier.  Also these days, all of these statements are available online so I might not need them anyways.

If you aren’t moving like I am and forced to go through everything in your house, consider making time to do the following:

  • Remove the “dead wood” from your files.  Shred old account statements and accounts you have closed.
  • Check the beneficiaries on all of your accounts.  Assume they are wrong and they need fixing.
  • Put all of your records together in one place and let your loved ones know where that place is.
  • Shred your tax returns that are more than seven years old.
  • Either store you records online with a system such as “Drop box” or “Box.net,” or keep only your annual statements in a file or binder.
  • Make it a practice to take time to go through old paperwork to review and purge– maybe every April 15th.

With all the natural disasters we are experiencing lately, it might also be a good idea to make up a ready access grab and go file that contains important documents such as your birth certificate, marriage license, insurance policy numbers and agents phone numbers, list of important phone numbers (in case your cell phone dies), and whatever else you might need in case you can’t get back into your home right away.  But don’t be like me and put every paper known to man in there so it isn’t an emergency folder but becomes an emergency file cabinet!

Anyone need a camera?  Old lap top?  Children’s toys from 1992?  I have plenty to share!