Sorting Things Out

for the past couple weeks, I've been on a mad binge of sorting.

it started with a visit to my mom's financial advisor. her estate is set up as a trust, and her advisor will be the trust administrator when mom passes on. the visit was for my brother and i to have clear in our heads what my mother's intentions are. the administrator's role will be to oversee the estate and ensure it continues to provide us with an income as opposed to us receiving it in a lump and having it disappear in too short a time. statistically, this is a sound move, as most estates do tend to disappear the way lottery winnings do within just a couple of years.

so, my husband and i took the opportunity to schedule an appointment of our own to try and get our own affairs in order. hubby retired 18 months ago. we weren't ready for it. we're still not ready for it. things are getting pretty serious. COBRA is due to run out in just another 6 weeks. we recently tried to refinance our mortgage and were turned down because there are repairs needed on the house. just those two bills alone are more than hubby's retirement income. we're digging a deeper hole. is there any way for us to keep hubby in retirement?

our appointment is next wednesday. the advisor needs certain paperwork to evaluate where we stand and what resources we have to draw upon. we have lots of files; they're in about 5 different locations around the house. i spent two days going through the files in my office. i've pulled out all the files for 2009 and most of the files for 2008. they're now boxed with the tax forms for their respective years and ready to be stored. the file drawer in my desk is now well-ordered; all the folders are labelled and sorted chronologically. whew! hubby's files are another matter, completely. that's going to take both of us a couple more days.

while i was sorting the files in the office, i kept looking at the closet in the bedroom (there are two more file cabinets in there). i tend to stack stuff wherever there's a level surface. the tops of the cabinets were piled high with clothes and the space in front of them was blockaded with more boxes of clothes and books. time to clear out the clutter. so far, i've given away 6 boxes of clothes, packed another box of "skinny" clothes i hope to use again, and thrown away at least two bags of things that were past hope. i've given away a floor fan, a toaster oven, and two more boxes of books as well. one of the file cabinets has been emptied, and the other is now accessible. woohoo!

in the meantime, hubby decided he just couldn't stand the lamp/table he's been using on the loft one more night (the lamp just doesn't work well any more). so, today, we moved that table off the loft, and rearranged the furniture and my papercrafting supplies to accomplish his space requirements. it was sort of a side-track from the files and the closet, but it's still a sorting adventure. he now has access to a bank of DVD storage, and the space under the futon has been cleared out, too.

and do we hoard much? going through the files i found files as old as 1982! and not even our own files - they were my mother-in-law's tax returns and social security statements. needless to say, we really don't need to keep those any longer. i've also managed to throw out about 4 boxes of old magazines.

i think we're going to keep working on this. it's probably a good thing he's retired - now we've got time to clean up.