Secret Lair of Paper Despair

I have tried, mightily, to tackle my paper tiger…but with little success. Early on I wrote of local successes…getting my desk cleaned off, for example. A desk, however, does not stay cleared off without a bigger plan to keep papers from reaching it again. I had a plan, but obviously it didn’t stand up to reality. Then, the mixture of always traveling spouse, sometimes traveling self, paperwork for three kids/self/ husband/dog…overwhelmed me. Yes, I’ve sunk even further into paper clutter. Then there was the identity theft.

Now, I did uncover the identity theft by being on top of things…but then it became so overwhelming that I pretty much went catatonic. Like an ostrich, I stuck my head in the sand and tried to pretend it wasn’t happening. That proved to be too difficult. But as I let the paperwork pile up around me I simultaneously tried to pretend it wasn’t there and tackled only the immediate tasks at hand to deal with it.

I haven’t done too well in the big picture, although I’ve managed to handle the smaller things. I dealt with the debit card debacle…twice. I dealt with our Visa and American Express cards being hacked pretty well, although Visa did call me and threaten to put the challenged charges back on my account if I didn’t hurry up and send the affidavit. Now, it’s not my signature that is really needed…and it’s tough when my husband’s schedule is so erratic that getting a police report filed took a few months.

I did try to go to the police department on my own, but the amount of information overwhelmed the officer at the desk and he asked me to organize and summarize it. I did so, and then realized that the only open issue was my husband’s retirement account…Fidelity has not been cooperative even though they freely admitted that the thefts were due to their own lax policies. So, even after I put together the summary, I had to wait for my husband to be home and go with me. When we finally got there, it took only 10 minutes due to my advanced preparation.

In the meanwhile, however, my insurance company closed my claim due to inactivity. I had been waiting for the police report because with it we get seven years of credit protection and without it, we only get 90 days. I got my affidavit prepared and set it out with my husband’s for him to fill out and sign his. He left them out for me before leaving on his last business trip, but they disappeared. Now neither of us can find them. Back to the drawing board.

It is time for me to dig into all of the papers around my house and, once and for all, get them under control. It’s not that different than my journey to get my fitness and health back under control. It’s a process which requires daily action and dedication. It requires me to get right back on track if I notice I’m drifting.

The harder part, is getting rid of the huge backlog. I’ve dug my head out of the sand and looked around. The sight is anything but pretty! I see piles and piles of receipts, yet more missing than found. I have months and months of credit card and bank statements un-reconciled. I know I’ve been here before and written in a positive tone about cleaning it all up. If I’ve learned anything on this journey it is that sometimes it’s necessary to retrace my steps and take a different path. So, here I go.

Find the Joy in the Journey, even when it takes you on some detours!

Paperwork Purgatory

I got so frustrated with trying to track my finances a couple of months ago that I pretty much gave up. Now I’m paying the price. My husband is not very good at remembering to give me receipts and since he travels all the time, who knows where the receipts end up…most likely on the floors of various hotel rooms. Sometimes he mixes them up with his business receipts and sometimes he uses our credit or debit card on a business-related item. I guess you could say we are opposites when it comes to money management…I track to the penny and he doesn’t track at all.

I have always known this about him, so I can’t really complain…it’s part of the package. When we were freshmen in college, he had a joint account with his mother. They kept his savings in a savings account and his mother would transfer money into the checking account when it ran low. This sounds nice in theory. Of course, this was in the dark ages before cell phones and the World Wide Web. In reality, he’d spend until he ran out of money, call the bank frequently to check his balance, and call his mom frequently to ask her to go to the bank and transfer money between accounts. I’m not sure how much interest he earned on the savings account, but it was certainly a fraction of the amount he spent on phone calls. I told him then and there that when we were married, I’d handle all the finances…and so I have, for 26 years.

I’ve been using Quicken for 20 years now and am in the habit of recording every penny I spend then reconciling with my bank statements once a month. I use it as a cash flow tool, entering all of the month’s automatic transactions at the beginning of the month and making sure we have enough money to pay the bills without running out before the next payday. When there’s a problem, I make adjustments ahead of time, like reducing a credit card payment or deferring some expenses. When I don’t get all the receipts, I can’t plan my credit card payments ahead of time. But at least with the checking account, I can look-up the latest transactions and copy them into Quicken even without the receipt. That turned out to be a good thing…

Last week while I was traveling in Germany, I happened to check the status of our bank account and noticed some recent debits that didn’t seem quite right. They were all in another state that my husband travels to frequently, but at a time when he wasn’t there. Turns out his debit card was hacked. Fortunately, although it was 4 a.m. back home, the customer service center for my bank was open and I was able to dispute the debits. By the time I got home, we had a stack of mail from the bank…more paperwork. When I mentioned my problem to a friend at work, she told me that someone filed a false tax return with her identity! Now I feel lucky that my problem is just a bit of paperwork…she had to contact the IRS, the originator of the stolen information, and her ex-husband to try to nail down the details so that the IRS will honor her real return.

It was almost dumb luck that I caught odd transactions on my bank account, but it made me realize I really need to get back on track with the rest of my finances. So here I am, spending an otherwise lovely weekend knee deep in old receipts and bank statements trying to get it all tracked and reconciled in Quicken. Once I’ve got it all squared-away, I can start working on my taxes. Then there’s the FAFSA to tackle. I have an objective to get all of my paper clutter under control by July and I’m starting to think I will never have it under control…but I’m sure going to give it the old college try this month.

Find the Joy in the Journey…even when it involves a lot of paperwork!

I’m Moving to the Clouds and I’m Not Coming Back!

I am a list maker. I have an enormous To Do List in the form of a composition book. I like to look through it every once and a while and feel a sense of accomplishment for all the items I’ve crossed off. I’ve even been known to add an item to the list JUS T SO I can cross it off! The things on this list are important things, but they are not urgent things. To me, urgent things are either completely unexpected (rare) or things that happened because I never did the important things that would have prevented the urgent situation (fairly common). This list is an attempt to assure I do the important things. I also use my calendar extensively. I would take it to the clouds too, but because it’s housed at my company’s server, it’s over on its own cloud which I can only access through my work computer or my cell phone.

But back to my lists…I have many including lists for:

• Groceries
• Things to buy
• Frequent traveler numbers
• Employee ID numbers of childcare services I’ve used
• Vacation days
• Books to read
• Music I like
• Gift ideas
• Gifts received and thank you notes written
• Summer program ideas for my kids
• Assignments for work
• Assignments for my non-profit work
• Blog ideas
• Ideas for my 50 by 50
• People to send Christmas cards to
• People to send Hanukah cards to
• Favorite restaurants

Well, you get the picture…I like my lists. Unfortunately, my lists have taken on a life of their own as I keep separate notebooks for some of these and a bunch are just Outlook notes on my work computer. I find myself lugging along all kinds of notebooks and I find myself printing out interesting things from the internet and keeping all of these things in a tote bag that I haul around with me in case I need to add to a list or need to access some information.

My shoulder aches just thinking about, so I’ve decided to take my lists to the clouds. I signed up for a note taking application and slowly but surely I’m transferring my precious data to the cloud. I’ve only scratched the surface of the functionality available such as tagging information to make it searchable and web-clipping things I want to read later. I’m still learning about the functionality to attach pictures, videos, audio clips, and scanned documents.

It’s time to clean out my tote bag and leave it behind! I am now able to access my information from home, the office, my cell phone, and from my new tablet (as long as there is Wi-Fi available).  Next up is exploring all the ways other people use the note taking application. Some use it for project management, others for workflow…I have a lot of exploring to do with the hopes of becoming more productive with less paper-clutter in my life and an easy way to access any information I’ve stored in the clouds.

Find the Joy in the Journey…even if it takes you to an ethereal world!