Three Areas Of Your Home To Clean Up And Organize Before Beginning Your Estate Planning

Finance & Money Blog

If you don't want your assets and property mismanaged after your death, it's extremely important to have a good estate plan. One component of estate planning, a will, can also provide a lot of much needed closure to surviving relatives. To ensure that your estate planning goes as smoothly and as efficiently as possible, prioritize cleaning up and organizing these three areas of your home.

Attic

It's common to have a lot of miscellaneous junk packed up in boxes in a small attic. If this is the case for you, you need to unpack and document everything you find so that you can include it in your will.

Otherwise, your relatives will have no idea what each individual item in your attic is intended for. To further reduce confusion, you can also take the opportunity to dispose of old and damaged items. Less possessions to obsess over means more streamlined and comprehensive estate planning.

External Shed

Any large equipment that's closely packed together in your shed will be very dangerous to remove by someone who isn't familiar with it. This is especially true for tools with sharp edges like chainsaws and lawnmowers. Chainsaws especially are prone to suddenly falling from a perch and causing injuries when the rest of a shed's contents are disturbed.

If you know exactly what you're keeping in your shed, you should at the very least write down the contents so that surviving relatives can take the necessary precautions. But it's a better idea to see how much stuff you can reasonably remove from your shed in order to make it less crowded.

Dining Room Cabinets

If you keep any valuable china or other glassware in your dining room cabinets, you should carefully pore over everything to ensure that nothing is too tightly packed. Otherwise, an unsuspecting relative could accidentally knock down something valuable while opening one of your cabinets.

Use cardboard boxes partially filled with newspaper if you have too much glassware to safely store in display cases and cabinets. It doesn't matter how good something looks while it's placed on display if it eventually breaks due to an accident.

There's no good reason to cut corners with your estate planning if you want to reduce your surviving relatives' stress and burden as much as possible. You should instead make every effort to keep your estate organized so that people will have something positive to remember you by. Contact professionals, such as those from Great Plains Diversified Services Inc, for additional help.

Share

15 January 2015

Raising Money for Adoption

Adoption is a beautiful thing. Raising a child someone else had is a completely unselfish act of love. Do you want to adopt a newborn in the near future but are afraid you won’t have the necessary funds to do so? Consider meeting with an experienced financial adviser. This professional can sit down with you and recommend viable fundraising options. For instance, you might want to take out a loan. Or you may wish to sign up for a grant. Obtaining a tax credit is also an alternative. On this blog, I hope you will discover effective tips to help you raise money for an upcoming adoption.