Out of Chaos an organizing newsletter
Forget the Go-Bag
Bombings, rising sea levels: It makes a girl think about what she would grab in an emergency. Today, I worked with a client who keeps a “Go-bag.” She keeps a statement from each bank and brokerage account, insurance policies, passport and social security information—the kind of stuff that would be useful if you couldn’t get home and you needed to access accounts in some kind of emergency. Some people keep vital medicines or prescriptions. The trick to any system like this is to maintain it, and it got me wondering if I should have something similar.
I tend to think that if I had to grab one thing (other than the kids) it would be the “official documents” that I keep in a plastic envelope (my husband says I’d leave the kids and take the photo albums, but he’s kidding, of course, sort of) because with a passport and birth certificate you should be able to at least prove who you are. But it occurred to me that I should really create a Go-list. I like the idea of one piece of paper with everything on it: bank account numbers, brokerage accounts, insurance policy numbers, credit card information. Maybe even some key phone numbers. This one you shouldn’t put in your smart phone—useless if your battery dies and the power is out, and it is too vulnerable to theft or loss.
The very act of making this list could be useful: Are there store credit cards you no longer use? Do you really need a savings account if you can now write checks from your investment account? The process of gathering the information together is an opportunity to streamline. It would be comforting to have it all on one page that I could put in my Official Documents folder, ready to grab when that 100-year flood comes. Hopefully, by then, the kids will be old enough to carry the photo albums.