Plan your death! from a financial perspective: Organize your important documents

Organize your important documents. It may feel it is not important but let us imagine some scenarios:
“Ma’am, we will have to do surgery, the survival rate for this surgery is 50%, please submit this consent form and please provide the insurance details to the admin so we can proceed with the emergency surgery”

”Sir, sorry to hear about your wife, we may sound inhumane but your wife took a personal loan of 500K from us by mortgaging your house, we request you to please pay the EMIs otherwise we will be forced to auction your home”

God Forbid any of our loved ones to hear this type of statement. But, these situations might be more common than you think. You might have planned your death from a financial perspective and left ample for your loved ones, but if they cannot find those documents at the right place and at the right time, you have not completed your job.

The loss of a person or the time when you are in hospital, your family would be having a mental struggle of their own, and they would not have time to go through all of your documents and gather the right documents in those situations, to be prepared for such situations you need to organize all your documents.

You could have your own way of organizing the documents, I would tell you how I do that.

Place of documents

Offline as well as Online. I organize my documents in a secured drive as well as offline in my locker. Storing my documents online helps me in a lot of scenarios, to quickly review the documents in different situations, showing my IDs etc. Offline is just a backup if something happens to the online storage I could scan the documents once again. For online storage I prefer iCloud as I am completely in the Apple ecosystem it comes in handy to store it in iCloud.

Organize your important documents

I have organised the documents in the form of different sub-folders for easy access, the sub-folders are as follows:

• Certificates – In the certificate folder I have all my certificates right starting from schooling, but if you prefer to keep only important certificates that is also fine, but I would recommend digitalising your important certificates, incase if you lose the physical ones.
• Family Documents – In family documents, you could keep the IDs of your loved ones for quick access. You could also sub-divide the folder as IDs, health reports, passport size photos etc
• IDs, Passport size photo, Signature – Your important IDs, passport size photos and digital signatures for easy access.
• Financial Documents – It is the most important folder, sub-divide this into different folders:
  • Insurances (put your digital health, life, car, and home insurance policies documents)
  • Investments (put your different investment account documents like bank account, Demat account, details of properties etc)
  • Liabilities (Put your different loan account details)
  • Miscellaneous (can put your bank statements or any other related documents)
• Miscellaneous Documents – All your other important documents come under this folder, I have sub-divided this into the following:
  • Company documents – All my company documents like salary slips, annual compensation statements, awards etc. come in this folder
  • Degrees and Marksheets – The degrees and marksheet for senior secondary, graduation, post-graduation, professional certifications etc.
  • Resume and digital visiting card – Your current resume and digital visiting card come in this sub-folder
• Favourite photos – To cheer me up at any low moments
• Monthly Financial Blueprint – Will explain this in the next blog

Online organization in my iCloud Drive

Offline organization in Folder

Persons who know about these documents

Let your 1-2 trusted loved ones know the place of your offline documents and share the secured folder link with them for online documents.

If you have any suggestions on how could we improve our organizing of important documents please let me know using the comment section.

Note: I know some people will raise questions on cyber security for using iCloud or other means of saving important documents, but for me, it has worked for the last 3 years and the convenience of having your important documents at the right moment has helped me in a lot of situations. People who find it risky to have their important documents online could use the offline method for storing their documents.

Have a great learning time, until we meet again

The Greedy Monk

Part one – Plan your death! From a Financial Perspective