“Organization is the Foundation to get the Rest of My Life in Gear.” Kathi Lipp
We are excited to announce the launch of the Financial Organization Challenge is happening today! As a reminder, this is 12 - tasks over the next 12 - months to increase your financial wellness. This wellness program will include a monthly video explaining the task and a monthly Q&A video. If you know someone who might be interested, please contact Kerrie@irvineadvise.com or visit the RPG - 2019 Financial Organization Challenge Facebook Page.
Also, if you’d like to learn more about Social Security and Medicare mark your calendar for January 30th and February 6th as Financial Planner Kim Anderson will be hosting two webinars on this topic. Stay tuned for more information on these webinars.
We hope you enjoy this week's edition of Monday Morning Quarter-Buck and the organizational advice provided by Financial Planner Becky Partridge.
Organize and De-Stress in 2019
By Becky Partridge
Do you ever feel overwhelmed by the piles of paper around you? What about the in-box full of emails or the computer where you can’t find the document you’re looking for? If that is something you’re feeling, you’re not alone. It can be very exhausting trying to figure out where you want to start when getting organized but trust me, once you get papers and emails organized it’s like taking a breath of fresh air.
A great starting point is to simply go through the papers and emails, and discard the junk mail. This will greatly reduce what you have to sort through later on. The next step I recommend is to get a file organizer (file cabinet, box, or file tote) for your physical papers. For emails and electronic documents, I would create general folders for the main topics and then inside of each folder you can make more specific folders. At this point, you haven’t filed anything, but it will help greatly once you start sorting through the documents and you can always create different folders and rename them if need be. Now comes the “fun” part. You get to go through each and every paper, email, and document you have. To avoid being overwhelmed and to increase the likelihood of fully finishing the project, try making a goal to tackle a pile every night or every week. This process doesn’t have to be done immediately.
Once you get through all the papers, emails, and documents, you will feel like you can breathe again. You will continue to get mail and emails so I would suggest that you set aside 10-15 minutes a week, or however long you think it will take you, to go through this week’s worth of mail and emails. This will help you stay on top and not feel bogged down again. Also, the junk mail and junk emails are unnecessary and you can often unsubscribe from them. For e-mail, you can try to contact the companies and ask to be removed from their mailing lists; for emails, there is usually a fine print “unsubscribe” link at the bottom of the email.
As you are getting organized, pay attention to some of those documents, it’s a great time to think about your personal and financial goals too.