I Didn't Think We Needed a Nokbox

If you had asked me five years ago whether I was organized, I would have said absolutely.

I wasn't one of those people with piles of paper on the kitchen counter or unopened mail stacked on the dining room table. We had a filing cabinet. We had a safe. We had a will. We had insurance. We had retirement accounts. We even had one of those folders from our attorney with all of our estate planning documents neatly tabbed and labeled.

In my mind, we were the organized family.

The funny thing is that nothing happened to change my mind. There wasn't a death in the family. Nobody got sick. There wasn't some dramatic event that made me suddenly panic and start planning for the future.

What changed my mind was sitting down one Saturday morning and trying to answer a question.

If my husband needed to take over everything tomorrow, could he?

Not eventually. Not after a few months of digging through files and making phone calls. Could he sit down tomorrow and know where to find what he needed?

The answer surprised me.

I knew where our insurance policies were. He probably did not.

I knew which credit card automatically paid certain bills. He probably did not.

I knew how to get into the account where we stored all of our important documents. He definitely did not.

None of this was intentional. I wasn't hiding information from him, and he wasn't uninterested. It's just what happens when you've been married for a long time. You divide responsibilities. One person handles one set of things and the other person handles another set. After twenty years, those habits become invisible.

What really got me was realizing how much information existed only because I happened to remember it.

Not because it was documented.

Not because it was organized.

Because it was in my head.

I knew the name of our insurance agent because I had talked to him three months ago. I knew which utility company serviced our vacation property because I had called them last summer. I knew which veterinarian our dog saw because I made the appointments.

Those things felt obvious to me.

But they weren't obvious at all.

A few weeks later, I started helping my mother gather information for her own records. She is in great health and still lives independently, but she wanted to get her affairs in order. As we worked through everything together, I kept finding myself asking questions.

Where is the deed to the house?

Who is your financial advisor?

Do you have long-term care insurance?

What bank is this account at?

What medications are you taking?

Sometimes she knew the answer immediately. Sometimes she had to search for it. Sometimes she wasn't sure.

And suddenly I was seeing the same situation from the other side.

It wasn't that either of us was disorganized. It was that neither of us had ever looked at our lives through someone else's eyes.

We knew where things were because we were the ones managing them.

That doesn't mean anyone else could.

I think that's why so many people put this off. We tell ourselves we're organized because, from our perspective, we are. We know where everything is. We know how everything works.

The real question isn't whether you can find what you need.

The real question is whether someone else could.

That was the question that changed everything for me.

Not because I was worried about dying. Not because I expected something bad to happen. But because I realized that being organized for myself and being organized for my family were two completely different things.

I had spent years making sure I knew where everything was.

I hadn't spent nearly enough time making sure anyone else would.