Show Me The Money! It's not what you make...it's what you keep!

 How are you doing?  A few actions that I have taken to enhance my feeling of competence in this area:

1. Writing a will. Perhaps it was the lack of reality around mortality, but we just had never gotten around to it. Both my tax advisor and financial planner asked about this piece one year and I realized I need to stop procrastinating. So I now have one! If you don't, please do this for your loved ones. You'll also insure that your assets go where you want them to. It probably pays to hire a lawyer to help you, but if you'd rather skip the legal advice (and fees), Nolo.com has a broad range of legal tools. You can also get software or a bookstore kit. I used a nice program called Family Lawyer 2002 which has scads of other useful forms in it as well.

2. Organizing My Papers. Julie Morgenstern's (She wrote Time Management from the Inside Out)  great article in O Magazine a few years ago led me to the website http://www.oprah.com/omagazine/200304/omag_200304_organize.jhtml  to print some wonderfully comprehensive forms for organizing my financial records. In our family, I am the person who knows where all the IRA and retirement fund info is, where the insurance policies are and where the bank accounts are. My husband would not know where to begin to look. So I have taken Julie's advice and bought an expandable file folder to organize the info and I've made a list of where everything else is. And then my financial planner suggested all the really important papers go in a fireproof file box. I bet, unfortunately, many with the recent fires wish they had done this.

3. A Review of My Long Term Financial Plan I had never had a financial planner review all my investments and tell me if I am doing what I need to be able to retire when I want with enough money to outlive me! When I decided to take the plunge, just pulling all the information together was a useful process. I learned that I need to reallocate and that while I have been doing an okay job at doing this myself, I am probably going to make more money on my investments with some professional help and guidance. I guess I was going the FSBO route! It was time to let someone who is an expert help me out!

Where do you stand?

What is the next step?