Why You Need a Whole Life List
Managing your financial life and a household requires information, and it's really helpful to have that information organized and at your fingertips.
The Whole LIfe List was born following my daughter’s bat mitzvah. That was a huge event to plan, and to do so, I made a control journal where I had all the information of the vendors, the guest list, and all the little details that needed to be addressed.
It was extremely helpful to help me plan and execute things, and the idea occurred to me that it would be helpful to have a similar journal with key information for my regular life. Key information such as:
Who services things in your home
Where your money is
How to get in touch with your professionals
How your pets are taken care of
Insurance
This is the type of information we don’t need every day, but having a way to easily access your insurance if a tree falls on your house, or suddenly you're in the hospital, is helpful.
I decided I would take a weekend, and gather all this information together for myself, and quickly realized the task was enormous. I kept getting sidetracked because things weren’t where I expected them to be, and I spent a lot of time searching for information.
While I did as much as I could in that first weekend, I was tired and my enthusiasm for the project waned. So I thought that it might be better to do this over time. Then I got the idea that maybe every month could be a different focus, and the Whole Life List in the year-round format was born.
Why this information is so important
We’re all busy living our lives, and none of us want to think about - or plan for - times that we might become incapacitated. But emergencies happen, and when they do someone still needs to pay the electricity bill and feed your dog.
We also age, and that may mean we need some assistance managing our financial lives - either from an adult child, or a daily money manager.
I know plenty of adult children who have gathered up this information for their parents and put a binder together with things like their will, power of attorney, and copies of insurance cards so they could grab it if they had to show up at the hospital.
The Magic is Not in the List Itself
As I found when I was gathering my own list, I had information everywhere.
I was using a variety of online tools to keep myself organized, but that meant my information was spread out, and I had to check five different places before finding the information I was after, and then spend a lot of time downloading things.
That can be a headache for you, but imagine if someone else needed to access your information - be it a spouse, child, or caregiver. Would they have any idea how to find the information they need?
That’s why I say magic is not in the list itself; the magic comes from having the information gathered in a single place, regardless of the style of the list.
The idea is not novel.
I've met adult children who have told me their dad keeps a notebook that he updates every year, and gives each child a copy. That’s perfect.
Any kind of list works - a binder, a spiral notebook, or an online storage vault like Everplans. The main thing that’s important is that the content of your list needs to match your life. So our Whole Life List is designed to give you ideas, but you don't necessarily need to do everything if it doesn't apply to you.
Why the Whole Life List is Free
I'm giving all this information away for free because the hard part is getting it done. A lot of people start out with a bang, but need some accountability to get it done.
Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.
Even if you do three out of 12 topics, or you do a little bit of ten topics, it's better than nothing. Every little bit helps.
At EMM, the Whole Life List has become a part of every client engagement. We follow a year-round cycle that allows us to spend 10-15 minutes gathering a piece of information, or verifying information is still accurate. This makes it a manageable process for us, and for our clients.
Even if you’re not a client of ours, I still want you to have the information. I created the Whole Life List challenge as a way to give you some accountability by promoting you with monthly tasks delivered via email. If this sounds like something you could benefit from, I encourage you to join the challenge today. We repeat the challenge, year after year, so that if you didn’t get it all done in the first year, you can add to it in a subsequent year. And if you are one of those amazing people who got it all done in year one, you can just spend year two updating anything that has changed.
Its a challenge, to be sure, but well worth it.