Not Everything Should Go On The Cloud
Posted by Jennifer Gumbel on Apr 5th 2019
In her Motion to Organize weekly column, lawyer Jennifer Gumbel talks organization, productivity, and more.
It’s becoming easier than ever to get rid of paper in your life.
Online banking, utility payments, and other digital services help keep us from swimming in paperwork. We have the technology at home to digitize and upload paper documents to the cloud.
But, much as our world is digitized, there are still documents you shouldn’t get rid of.
Car titles, abstracts or title insurance policies, birth and marriage certificates, and wills are all things that don’t have a digital replacement. Of course, let’s not forget about tax time, which likely brings in all sorts of paperwork you normally don’t deal with.
There are also things that you might not want floating around digitally.
Your child’s social security numbers or even your online passwords might be better left off the cloud, as you wouldn’t want someone to access those or any other sensitive information in the event of a data breach.
You also want to make sure that important information is accessible to people you trust if they need to get to it.
If you got struck by lightning, could your parents, your partner, or your adult children get into your part of the cloud? Do you have a death binder in place the event the worst should happen?
Whatever the reason, there is some paper that you’re just going to have to contend with. With the smaller amount of paperwork we do have to deal with, consider investing in quality binders and index tabs that are useful and look good, to wrangle it all.
Written by Jennifer Gumbel
Jennifer Gumbel is an estate planning and probate lawyer in Austin, Minnesota. She takes her morbid nerd-dom to another level by talking about how to organize your after life, with the website An Organized (after)Life and the podcast, An Organized (after)Life, which you can find on the website, Spreaker and ITunes. You can also find her on Instagram with pics on death organizing and small town Minnesota life at the handle @jengumbel.