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Lesson Info

Keeping Track of Your Details

So life and legacy little goldfish jumping into the bigger bowl so we just went through living wills and the main points are it's important and it's easy to d'oh um it's not scary see, we just talked about it for an hour and none of us actually died that we're talking about it right it's not scary. In fact, we laughed a couple of times right? Okay, um and it could be actually a beautiful thing that can add to your life today so it's not scary. In fact, it could be quite an amazing thing to dio um, options to get it done you khun download your state specific living will from a number of websites out there and the web reverse there are quite a few and the ones that I have looked at previously is I know the aarp decide create share program has one and compassion and choices also has one you can just do a search and there are a number of options as well that make sure it's your state and work with an attorney if you have any questions at all on dh this is usually done along with your will ...

so you might as well just make a little care package consider and visualize your priorities a step number one and it sounds like we all were thinking that that was one of the most important things to do after that confirm those with the people in your life sign the papers boom and then you're done not anything legally binding unless it's signed so that wraps up living wills and now we're going to go into some details um details is it's it's one of the things that you can set you free and it's the other thing that can cause your life to come to a grinding halt and pretty sure the reason why that quote and I don't know who actually started it the devil is in the details it can't be more true in this situation like every other one it really doesn't depend we're talking about keeping track of things and listing things and we'll be talking about ways you can do that online ways that you can write it in a notebook and put it on top of your fridge you know everyone's snowflake and the way that you want to take care of this and manage it is totally up to you just the fact that getting your arms around the multiple levels of stuff we have in a bunch of places is actually kind of an awesome thing to d'oh. So again, this isn't legal advice not your accountant rock your world it's your own this is informational and always always always always know what you're signing before you sign it so details so what we're actually talking about when it comes to details is your stuff and your digital life and your digital life is something that is getting a lot of press and a lot of action and a lot of new industry around it, so you're online assets, your password, your social network accounts, your online brand, your world of warcraft dude, your money things you own things you don't own but belong to you. So as the internet gets bigger and bigger and as so many more of our banking and stuff in our life is migrating to online, it makes our life easier and all of these ways that we know in love and there's also an extra level of organization and kind of just keeping track of stuff that way haven't quite I caught up with in a lot of ways, and over the last few years there have been a lot of very public cases, not very pretty ones about people trying to get assets and they can't or very tragic situations where, you know, a minor lost their life and parents trying to get right. So the digital landscape is a place where the laws about technology have not kept up with the actual technology. So there's a little bit of a wild west miss going on right now that we'll talk a little about taking more care of the basic stuff, too is you kind of don't realize how much you've got going on um, until you need some information, and I think where this devil in the details thing popped up for me first is that I mean, for example, every year, I have to fill out forms for kids, and I have to look up a social security number, I have toe find the immunization things, there's all these little things that I put in that one spot, but that one spot often is in a lot of different spots, and then I have to keep re checking for the basic information there's also, you know, like your policies and your birth certificates and licenses, and just this stuff that you need all in one place. So there's legal there's financial, there's medical, you know, like where immunization forms are other things, just the paper, paper stuff. And then one of the ways in which it seems we are most often struck with when you don't know something, eyes when we need to help somebody else, right, even if it's, like, can you run over to the house and get this, or can you do my amazon fresh order this week, or can't can you do something like that? Even little little things are almost impossible when you have to track something down for somebody else, like, if I can't find my kid's own immunization copy how is somebody else going to find it right when there's like twelve boxes of papers and some new stuff over here and then my like to be filed category which is basically like if you put it in a box called to be filed then you can pretend that you're organized but when the boxes this big and there's stuff from like that's not organizing right like so I needed to pull it together because I didn't have stuff and then I needed the four number password to my husband's phone and I didn't have that so it's just taking care of business because otherwise it's just a noisy noisy mess out there so your digital life the same way that you know living wills and will's laws differ from state to state there's no federal law unless you know that miners are different that says everything that you on own online is yours um everyone should have a couple of basics written down and then there's one way to try to help confirm that your digital stuff is yours and that is having a digital power of attorney listed in your power of attorney document so somebody who manages your finances the guardianship, the executor of your will but if you write down a digital power of attorney, what that means is that you're giving somebody permission on your behalf if you cannot tio get access to your user name and password if you don't already have it and the content of whatever is in your account and so that's pictures that your music collection it's all the stuff that you own on gets really, really, really hard to get to it if you don't have the user name and password. So first of all, if you don't have a digital power of attorney on do you have everything written down, then somebody could go in and get it for you if they can get access to something if you don't have access and a digital power of attorney has legal right to go in and requested on your behalf and you have to go, teo, you know this account in this account in this and that, and try to figure out how to get the information and get it back into your domain, and it doesn't always work different companies have different policies about their contract with you that it was, you know, really or imagined by your them, um but the thing is that it's complicated, so get around all of that by having your information actually in one spot so somebody can get to it. Um, the thing that I think is pretty fantastic is that the interwebs is this place that we love going to, but when you think about it is just this giant, enormous, cavernous world in which we live in which is quite exciting isn't like this unlimited library in which we live like surrounded by things all the time so that those could be beautifully organized like, you know, those old grand libraries were like everything shiny and like the shiny god raise air coming in through the windows or it could be an enormous pile of crap that you have to figure out where the dostoevsky isthe right? Um so the other thing is that people aren't necessarily realizing that you know, your your photos are mementos that you want to have and you'll be sad if you can't access your six thousand pictures or all of these things because you may or may not have, you know, sink them into your computer or stored them someplace and then if you have them in a computer, you don't know how to get to those but digital assets are also worth money, right? So there's a whole new kind of business growing up around the fact that we have, you know, money in the cloud essentially, and we have a hard time managing it and keeping track of it. So in a way article about how much of your digital assets worth what australians have valued valued their assets is about three thousand dollars is what they think their digital stuff this worth the value of people younger is much, much higher and towards on then it goes down a little bit for older people because younger people are more used to having all of their stuff online rather than maybe just doing work or email so we need to get it together and the I love this from the digital death guide which is a digital death guide from the u k that's specifically if you're looking for examples a sword and this game that I don't even I haven't even heard of before play these things can be sold for like sixteen thousand dollars world of warcraft apparently like you run around and gather gold and get things and like you have you earn credit or these things that you can actually sell online so all of these like for real for real money for real real money s o so it's not even just maybe my son and spending all this time playing minecraft maybe I don't know maybe I wasn't paying for his college or somebody you're a millionaire and you didn't know yeah right but if you are a millionaire online you should probably do want to know and you probably want to be able to get at that level seventy four elvin night on world of warcraft and sell it and by any far I made that up hold on for I don't know what way tonight way live in this world where we're living in a giant or miss library all of the time. Um we love this world we just have to rein it in a little bit and not say oh technology is killing us we just have to like harness it a little bit so instead of thinking about all the ways that were bad with stuff it's kind of fun to start from the good place so when are we really, really good with the details right? Like a lot of people are like I'm not good with details so I'm not good with money right? But if you're planning a vacation you know exactly when you're taking scuba you know exactly what time things were coming so let's talk about this from a way that where we're good with things right? So parties great party planning weddings the exhaustive level of planning and detail for weddings are re stimulating you my region where you were just married is that okay? No good it's fresh it's fresh well and there's a lot of details it was a lot of fun playing those deals details I'm sure this could be this great there's down to like the color of napkins we talk about that stuff aa lot right? Right yes buying a home is a really fun process it also has a lot of dough details that we, you know spend weeks or months or years driving around looking at things pretending we're there, you know, like there's all these ways having a baby like the amount of time I spent writing of birth plan it was like monumentally exponential compared to the amount of time that I would write a living will for my death like we do so much around babies you know, like I labored over like the gender neutral paint color for the nursery for weeks, right life like I won't embarrass myself further but seriously like exhaustive level of like gender neutral like child development stuff but because it's fun vacations, honeymoons remodels hiking trips, dinner parties all of these things were really, really good at and each time we have somebody come over to our house, what do we say right? Are you are you I'm not even having like the baby sitter come over without cleaning the bathroom first or strangers nobody you know? I mean like, no, we can't have anyone over with the house looking like this, right? Like we think of that all the time, but what we don't think of is what's in the closets, right and what's kind of under the bed and this is what happens mostly when you don't take care of your digital details and you have a lot of people coming over to your house and you haven't cleaned the bathroom yet and this is what it looks like this is a slide from a friend of mine who a couple of weeks ago um well, he sent this to me a few weeks ago, but the last few months have been spent pretty much full time him working on helping his partners aging parents get into a home and cleared out of their house and this is not like this is not one of those hoarders shows right like this is this is a pile of paper that many people have a right and a storage unit of the stuff that you forget about, which is not that dissimilar to what basement's looked like or the you know, the crawl space or something. So we're thinking about our life and our stuff and it feels like, oh, you know, just get it together and that feels daunting, but think about if you have to start digging through someone else's stuff to figure out how much money they have or what they qualify for for a long term care or what their medicaid benefits mate might be when social security can or can't kicked in. So we're having people over to the house all the time on our house looks like crap so it's, so much nicer toe walk in and have a clean bathroom and it's so much nicer to know that people can pop by and you don't have to like spend two hours breezing around cleaning the house each time when you spend an hour to just cleaning the house once on dh I'm including this note because I think it's really interesting if you saw the other pictures, you would think that this one was just a little thing but it's just a wee bit of nothing but oh my god, yes, please tell everyone to get a file cabinet or a fire safe or something to put the real things the real key things in the wind is really knocked out of my sails when after cleaning that apartment is spending a long day getting stuff in order that to find another area with a bunch more stuff that was still a mess, including something like an uncashed check for twenty seven thousand dollars. Well, so yeah, yeah, that means that you can't throw any of it out without going piece, but e in this particular situation, there was a twenty seven thousand dollars check in there somewhere, right? And you don't know what's important and you don't know what seven years old and not important unless you at least look at it and even if that means just guessing that you take five or ten seconds to scan each one of those that's a lot to d'oh a lot to do and it happens a lot it happens in our own rooms we all have our little piles of shame, right? Like I'm about it, you know, little pile of shame you know, I started doing a little bowl of this. You know the stuff. And, you know, I had do it when the bull kept toppling over how to get a little bit medium sized ball. So it's it's. Not that hard. Things can kind of pile up quickly, but we just don't want to get to hear, especially when somebody else needs to take care of stuff for us.