010 - The Lisa Glossary Part 10: Organize 365® Binders

Thanks for listening to this special playlist of the Organized 365 Podcast. The Organized 365 Podcast started in 2014. With over 500 episodes and 15 million downloads, we know there is a lot of content to sift through. This taste of the Organized 365 Podcast is just a taste of what you can find in the full podcast and is easy to share with your family and friends who want to join you on your quest to learn the skill of organizing and grow your mindset of what is possible as you move into a proactive and purposeful life. Enjoy this podcast curation of the Organized 365 Podcast that will take you through all the big ideas we have uncovered in the last 7+ years of podcasting. Along the way, I, Lisa Woodruff, have created a whole new glossary of terms for us to use to define and understand the invisible work and belief systems we have from our childhoods and how and why homes function the way they do.

This week's mailbag comes to us from Rachel. Thank you so much, dear Lisa. I'm almost finished reading "Organization is a Learnable Skill" and loving it and have loved listening to your fabulous podcast over the past several years. Your warmth, positivity, and wisdom have been such a source of joy and encouragement, and our home and family are happily thriving thanks to your inspiration. I wanted to share with you that I first discovered your podcast during a season in which we suffered multiple pregnancy losses and a stillborn little boy. I sincerely apologize if that is too much information or triggering in any way. Listening to your podcast helped me provide peace, comfort and direction as I organized our home and processed the losses. You were like a fun, kind and compassionate older sister. And I felt empowered to control what I could control. In this case, our home and lifestyle. Your transparency and authenticity and beautiful joy and spirit have been so wonderful. We are so thankful to now be blessed with 3 little boys, which keeps us happy and busy, and thanks to you, organized. Thank you again for the difference you have made in my life. I wish you every happiness. Sincerely, Rachel. Do you have an Organize 365 success story? If so, we would love to hear it. Please send us an email at customerservice@organize365.com and tell us how you have taken back your home, your paper, and your life with Organize 365.

Welcome to the Organized 365 Podcast. I'm your host, professional organizer, productivity expert, and motivational speaker Lisa Woodruff. This podcast will help you embrace progress over perfection and create lasting functional organizing in your home. I have so much to share with you. So let's get started. In the last glossary podcast, I told you all about The Paper Solution, how that book came to be, how I came to realize that paper was something that I knew how to organize in a unique way, and why we as Americans especially are not going to be able to get rid of paper anytime soon. And I glossed over a really big portion of that book, which was these essential household binders. I told you all about why I don't think file cabinets work, how we can go through our file cabinets and get rid of the 80% of papers that we don't need, and that we need to put them in binders and what those 4 binders are. But today I want to really go through in more detail what those 4 binders are, what goes inside of them, why the papers in your file cabinet aren't enough to create those binders, which is why it's sometimes hard to just create these binders on your own versus using the Organize 365 binders and instances in which I have used them myself. So first, to reiterate, there are 4 essential household binders, and these are basically the 4 big categories that I noticed almost everyone's file cabinet papers fall into, and they are financial papers, medical papers, household reference papers that are related to your house, And household operations paper that is related to how you run your house, irrelevant of whichever house you're in. So these 4 essential binders, these 4 buckets will hold almost every single thing that you have in your file cabinet. The only thing that will not end up in these 4 binders are tax documentation, like your substantiating tax documentation here in the United States. I actually do still leave that in my file cabinet. I have a file cabinet only for tax information. And kid-related papers. So I mentioned there's a Warrior Mama binder and a school memories binder. I'll touch on those at the end as well. So financial, medical, household reference, household operations. I shared these stories last time that I realized that we needed a different answer other than filing our papers in filing cabinets Not only because they were hard to establish and really hard to maintain. I already knew that by working with my in-home professional organization clients, but I was willing to work inside of that limitation until 2017, when the hurricane in the South and the fires in the West simultaneously collided with my clients. And they were asking me, how do they evacuate their home with their essential paperwork? And I did not have a good answer. And that's when I realized that no matter how organized I could get a filing cabinet to share with someone else, it was never going to be portable when you had to evacuate. And also, when I really thought about it, it is extremely rare that you actually need the papers at home. You almost always need the papers, um, wherever you need to go, with the doctor, with the lawyer, with the family member or whatever. We need our important paperwork to be portable. And so I personally have always used binders. And I said at the end, I'll talk about the binders that you can make for kids to advocate for them. But that's where I was already using binders. Both of my kids have IEPs, which is an individualized education plan. And in advocating for them medically and in the education system, I had figured out that I needed to combine both of those documents into one portable binder, and it was a 2-inch thick binder for each kid. And whenever I went to the doctor or I went to the school, I would take this binder and inevitably the doctor would ask me an education-related question and the school would ask me a medically related question. So because I had their medical and their education tests and records in one binder and with me, I was able to advocate for them. And I'll never forget the first time that I realized how powerful this was. I was sitting in a meeting with about 8 different school professionals and the tone of the meeting was, "Lisa is a crazy mom. Let's just placate her and then maybe she will go away until the next time we have to have this meeting with her." They were done with me. They were so done with me. They were done with all of my requests. They were done with all of the extra tests I wanted run. They just thought, you know, like, here's the case, here's where we are, here's what our tests show. We don't believe what you're saying. We're looking, you know, this child and these tests match what we expect and what you're saying doesn't match what we expect. And I said, well, I have a test that shows one of your tests is off by 50 points. And they're like, yeah, whatever. And I flipped in my book and I pulled it out and I handed it to the person next to me. And they said, "She's right." And then they passed that paper around the table and that, the tone of that meeting went from, "This is a crazy mom who wants more than she, her child deserves and she has unrealistic expectations for what can be provided," to, "Oh my gosh, how can this happen? We've never seen this happen before. Who gave this test? When was this given?" Have there been any traumatic injuries? Like the tone of the room went from Lisa is crazy and is asking for things that she shouldn't ask for to, oh my goodness, what happened to this child? Why is this child's test scores changing so drastically that we have never seen before? And how do we figure out the root cause and how do we support the child? That happened because I had a binder and I could produce a piece of paper that gave my the same exact words that I was saying, the authority and the gravity that they needed to have for those experts to believe me. That is what paper is for. It is to ease communication. And that is why I'm a paper organizer and not a digital organizer. You can take these binders and you can digitize them. And if you're in the Productive Home Solution, you get digital PDFs of what I'm about to tell you, and you can, you could do everything in the cloud, but I have settled in a state and I have advocated in hospitals for my father's healthcare, and I have advocated in hospitals and education settings for my kids, and in every single instance, they have never asked me for, for a digital file, nor has sending a digital file after the fact gotten the same results as walking into that room with a big binder. Walk softly and carry a big binder, and you'll get everything that you need. So let's talk about the first binder. The first two binders were created because I ended up being the power of healthcare, power of attorney, and settling my father's estate. I was like 35 years old. We didn't have a lot of money at the time. I was working. Our kids, uh, you know, were in a difficult season of life. I just didn't have any time to be traveling 4 hours home on a regular basis because my father was sick and then ultimately passed away. It was a really hard year of my life. Adding to that, I had no idea what I was doing. No idea. Like I had— luckily I had been advocating for my kids in the medical realm and I have an aunt, one of my dad's sisters is a nurse. So whenever they would give us, um, test results, we would call my aunt and be like, what does this mean? Like, what does this mean? What does this number mean? And this was about 10 or 12 years ago. So Google was around, but it wasn't— you could not Google things the way you can now as far as like test results and things like that. Now I'd be like, give me the MyChart app and let me log in and see all the test results there and print them out. But we weren't at that point. And there were a few key numbers that they were watching for my dad. And, and we would notice when this certain number got to this certain threshold, he'd need another blood transfusion. Like that was something that we'd notice. And then he'd go up again and then down again, up again and down again. And my sister lives in our hometown and I live about 4 hours away. So the day to day of his illness really fell on my sister. And then when he was hospitalized, I would, I would come up and every time I came up to my hometown, I would stay at the house. Nobody's there but me. And so I started realizing that my father's illness was exactly like his father's illness at the same exact age. And I kind of knew where we were going and that he was gonna pass away eventually. Maybe it would be a couple months, maybe it would be 10 years, but it wasn't going to be 30, 40 years. And so I started realizing that I was going to be tasked with settling this estate. And the longer he was sick, the more Emily and I had to really figure out, okay, what bills are due and when are they due? And how do we log into Dad's checking account? And luckily my father had set up a really good power of attorney. When we actually called his lawyer and said, okay, you know, we need the power of attorney and all of that, he said, you have the most liberal power of attorney you can have. Like we could've sold property, we could get outta leases, we could do, we could do a lot of things. Apparently there are more kinds of powers of attorney. There's not just one kind. So that was great. And knowing that this was going to end, end in a funeral, we started doing things that we would not have done if we did not have such a liberal power of attorney. And if we did not have, you know, really knowing that this was most likely going to end in a funeral. So one of the things that we did is my father owned his house and he owned a car. And those properties were titled in his name. And I had, in my area, there's this gorgeous farm that the, when the man died that owned the farm, they had to sell all of the property in order to keep just the farmhouse because his will and his trust had not been set up correctly. And in order to pay the taxes, they had to sell all the property. So if you have a deed to your house or a car, you own your car and it's in your name, and you pass away, then that asset goes through probate and you owe taxes on that asset. But you can also, just so you know, stay-at-home mom, former teacher talking, not a lawyer, not a whatever. But what I researched and I learned was, and our power of attorney allowed us to do this, we were able to change the house and the car into transfer on death deeds, which meant that the house and the car were in my father's name, but the minute he passed away, the ownership of those assets transferred on death to my sister and I. And when you have same exact deed, like this is not expensive to do, you just have to send, spend a day in a courthouse or something, then that asset immediately transferred to us outside of probate, meaning that taxes were not owed on that house and on that car. And thank goodness we did that 'cause otherwise the estate would've been insolvent. These are the things that I was figuring out as my father was sick and passing away over the course of 9 months. And I say this because if you have experienced this, you're like, yep, I figured out that. And you're making a whole long list of all these other things you figured out as well that you wanna tell people that are coming after you. And if you have not experienced this, you're going, what is she talking about? And I don't really wanna worry about this. I don't know what to tell you, but your parents are probably gonna pass away before you. Or at least they hope they are gonna pass away before you. And you probably are going to settle an estate at some point, and you probably are gonna be the power of healthcare for a loved one at some point in time. I know many friends who become power of healthcare for close friends. And so it doesn't necessarily have to be someone in your family that you might end up in this situation in. And what I found out very quickly is that while almost all of us will experience both of these events, There is no binder out there to buy. You could buy, there are a few books. There's really not that many books either. I, I don't know why there's not more resources because everybody has to do this. Why, why are there not more resources? And what I specifically wanted, I wanted a workbook. I got a book and the book was fine and I had to learn from the book and then I had to do more research and then I, I figured out enough. Obviously I figured out the transfer on debt. There are other things I didn't figure out. But I was like, okay, there's gotta be a way to organize all this information. I need a binder, but I don't just need to go buy a binder from the store. Like, I need to know what goes in it. And I was going through my father's filing cabinet at the end because I was like, well, I know the information's in the filing cabinet. I just said in the last episode, 80% of what's in your filing cabinet, you don't need. All my dad's golf scores were in there. Every car he'd ever owned. I don't need that stuff. Stuff. And then there's stuff that you do need, but you don't know where it is. And if you've never settled an estate before, you don't know what you don't have. After my father passed away and I started, uh, physically organizing people in Cincinnati, I helped quite a few people settle estates and they literally would take me to the lawyer with them. And as we're going through the paperwork and I'm creating these binders for them, I'm saying, where is this? And where is this? And where is this? And they're saying, oh, I didn't know I needed that. So then when I'm in front of the estate lawyer with my client, I'll say, where's this? Where's this? Where's this? The estate lawyer says to me, oh, we didn't know she needed those forms. We didn't know she needed that. I said, well, how would she know that she needed it? And they're like, well, how would we know that she needed it? I'm like, well, how do you know what she needs and how does she know what you need? Or like, I would find checks and I'd be like, the, we have to cash these checks. And they would say, oh, we didn't know that you needed that, whatever. Like, There is definitely a miscommunication here between estate lawyers and people who are settling estates because you settling the estate have no idea what the law is and what you need in order to settle an estate. And people who are settling estates, estate lawyers and the paralegals, they don't know what's in your file cabinet. And usually you don't go through or you don't have time to go through all of the papers and all of the files inside of a house in order to know what there is in order to use it to settle the estate. So I've spoken to Norm, a lot of estate lawyers since I've had to do this with my father. And what I found is quite a few estate lawyers will have paralegals or organizers that will come in your home and they will organize your papers for them and then take the papers to the lawyer. Can I just explain to you how expensive this is? Like, first of all, an estate lawyer, not inexpensive. Second of all, to pay an estate lawyer staff to come through your house and go through your papers, Also not very inexpensive, and most estates don't have the money to pay for that. And so who's gonna go through the paper?

You are.

When my grandmother passed away, I was not in charge of her estate. My mom was in charge of the estate. And I said, Mom, how can I help you? And she said, please come do the paper. And I just sat there. I went through every single one of Grandma's files. Now Grandma had paid for her funeral. Everything was transfer on death. Like she had everything, like she was German and she was raised in the Great Depression and like her final resting place was purchased in the '80s. Like she had, and she passed away 5 years ago. She had everything ready for her final days. Like when she was 75, like she had it all done, ready to go. And she passed away at 94. She was as organized as you could possibly be. The files still had to be gone through. Like, I still had to go through the files, and there was nothing in there that would prevent us from settling the estate, but there was a lot of stuff in there that family members wanted or was just nostalgic for us. So this financial binder, this having been responsible for my father's bills for almost a year and then selling the house and selling the car and getting out of a lease and getting out of a partnership in a business, and like, he had 4 lawyers when he died, so it was not a non-complicated estate and I'm doing it from 4 hours away. By the way, when this happens, no one stops your life for you. It's not like freeze tag when you're a kid where everybody goes, okay, freeze, I'm gonna go settle this estate and then I'll come back to my regular life. No, I'm still drowning in debt. My kids have medical needs, plus I'm also not home and that's causing more stress on the marriage. Like it was a horrible, horrible time. And when I finally cobbled together whatever I thought was going to be my binder to settle the estate based on what I had read in these books, and walked into my dad's estate lawyer, she said, you just saved yourself thousands of dollars with this binder. Now see if you can go find these papers. And I was like, oh my gosh. And I was able to take those papers down to Cincinnati where I live and organize those while my sister dealt with cleaning the house, selling the house, and doing everything that had to be done in a physical location. So the financial organizing binder, which was created about 5 years after my father passed, A friend and I, she also took care of her parents. They lived with her and then they both passed away. So she had to settle estates as well. We combed through what we both had done, the books we read, the lawyers that we talked to, what the IRS needs, all of those things. And we created a workbook that goes inside of our binder. So all of the Organized 365 binders are 2-inch binders. They're deluxe D-ring, one-touch flip-back binders. They're— I love a good binder and my binder is deluxe. Let me tell you. But inside is a packet of papers in each of these binders, and it's the packet of papers that makes the binder so valuable. Because while yes, we need to ditch the file cabinet and get that paper into a binder, and we know we don't need how much paper is in the file cabinet, there are two other sources of information that you need to fill your binder. And the file cabinet paper usually only does about 30% of the binder. So taking your file cabinet and putting in binders is not the same as creating an Organized 365, uh, Essential Binder. The Essential Binder has what would be in your file cabinet to start. The second 30 to 40% of the information that you need is actually stored digitally. And I personally either print it out or I put the URL where you would find that information, login and password inside of the, um, binder. So you need to print things out, or you need to find things on the internet that are stored digitally. And you may say, yeah, but I know where they are digitally. Yeah, you know where they are digitally. But if somebody's your power of attorney or settling your estate, do they know where they are digitally? Usually not, even if it's a spouse. So making this binder, again, it's kind of for you, it's not really for you. It is for the people that have to organize your finances and your life for you. So 30 to 40% in your filing cabinet, 30 to 40% online. Well, where's this other nebulous amount of information, Lisa? It's in your head. It's in your head. Yep. And you don't know what you're keeping in your head and not on digital and not on paper until you need that information. And for you, when you're handling your own finances, you're like, oh yeah, I know that. Like, I know my birth date, I know my Social Security number, I know, you know, the year we bought the house. And some of this you can find on paper, but some of it you cannot. And in some of the other binders, especially the medical, there's a lot that's in your head. But in the financial, you would be surprised how much is actually still in your head. So each of these binders comes with a workbook. And inside of the Paper Solution, I give you the outline of what you wanna put in the binder. But when you buy an Organized 365 binder, this is what, I really just made it for me. It's like, you don't have to buy it, but I made it for me. Like, I would've paid $7,000 for this binder when I had to settle my dad's estate to get a binder that would give me exactly the categories that I needed. And then to fill, it's like Mad Libs for adults. You just fill in the entire workbook in there and you have all of the information. So as you're filling out the information, there might be substantiating information in a file cabinet or on a computer. That you can print out and goes with it, but also you can just write it down, like if you know what the information is and you don't need the paper. So that is the Financial Organizing Binder. It organizes your current money, your future money, retirement, insurances, cars, physical inventory of the house, your estate planning, your end-of-life information that you want. It's all in there, and it is more of a gift for your family than it is for yourself. I would say that I rarely reference my financial organizing binder. I update my insurance information in there, you know, 'cause you're always getting new insurance cards. I always update our life insurance in there, but I very, very rarely go, oh, I need to find that in my financial organizing binder. Like unless there's a car accident and we need our, car insurance. We, we don't reference what's in there, but that is all the information that Greg or I would need if we were settling each other's estate or if somebody else would need to settle ours. The second binder that I made, which I made together, I made these two together, is the medical organizing binder. Now the medical organizing binder is interesting 'cause there's usually like 5 to 10% of what you need in that binder in your filing cabinet. And then maybe 40 to 50% online in, in all of the different online places that you go in the United States for your medical. You have prescriptions, you have your insurance, you have your primary care doctor, you have your dentist, you have all these different medical professionals that you go to, and they don't communicate with each other, and their systems are all separate. So I don't have my entire medical history printed out and in this binder. But when we were caring for my father, and when I was actively caring for one of our kids as they were being diagnosed, I did have it all. Printed out. And the reason I had it all printed out was because when I'm sitting in the waiting office or I'm sitting there with the doctor and they ask me what the latest test was, maybe you can find it on your app, but it's also really easy to flip to it, hand it to a doctor. I was doing a Wednesday podcast episode and the interviewee said that without creating a medical organizing binder, she would not have gotten pregnant. And I said, okay, we don't need to make that kind of a claim. Like, I don't really think it's the organizing binder. She goes, no, no, it was the organizing binder because her doctor, when they went to implant the embryo, would have implanted it differently based on the digital information that they had. But because the patient had printed out the scans, she saw something different in the printed version than she saw on the, computer version. And the doctor who had done the procedure before this doctor had said to the patient in the printed scan, right here, this is the place the new doctor needs to insert the baby. Um, but that wasn't in the digital record. Like, there was no way to have that in the digital record. And she said if— and the doctor said if she hadn't known that, the baby wouldn't have taken. And, you know, that's what she says, not what I'm saying, but I know this to be true over and over and over again. You don't need a medical organizing binder if you have hay fever and that's it and you have no other medical issues. But as soon as you become a caregiver or an advocate for someone, it is so helpful to have your notes written down from the last time you saw the doctor. So I would do this with my kids. I wrote down every psychiatrist, every doctor, whatever. Just sometimes it was on the back of an envelope. It wasn't pretty. I'm not turning this in for a grade. And so when I would be in the waiting room waiting to see the psychiatrist again, I would be reviewing what we talked about the time before to see if there's anything I wanted to follow up from. And I would've been keeping a list between that appointment and this one of things I wanted to remember to ask about because my kid was 5 and I didn't, you know, you couldn't ask them how they felt. I had to kind of write down observations of what I was noticing and how their, behavior was changing so I could discuss it with another professional so we could figure out what's the next step that we're going to do here. So the medical binder is like 5 to 10% in your filing cabinet, maybe 40 or 50% online, but it's almost all in your head. It's your gut intuition. I cannot, I could tell you story after story after story of when I was with a doctor who is, you know, renowned in their field and it would be this medication or that medication. And I would've already done my research and I would say, I know that this medication is newer, but I like how that medication works, or because of how my child reacted to this medication, the research that I've done says this should be the choice over that one. And the doctor would almost always say, I was thinking the same thing, let's go with your choice. You have a gut instinct about what is gonna work best for your body or those that you're caring for. Like, you're the caregiver for a reason. I believe that you are put in this situation for just such a time as this. And that you have intuit knowledge that paired with the professional knowledge will bring about more healing and comfort and care. So inside of the medical binder, we also have a workbook, and that's where you write down your medical health history. This was a game changer. If you do nothing else, do this. So I would take my kids to new doctors, new doctors, new doctors, figuring out what the diagnoses were. And finally, when they were like 4 or 5, I sat down one weekend And for each of them, I just wrote from the time they were born, their 5-year medical history, because every new doctor wanted to know, when did they sit up? When did they crawl? When did they say their first word? When did they this? And I was like, oh my gosh, every time I'd be like, I don't remember, I don't remember, I don't remember. So I wrote it all down. Then when did the symptoms first present themselves? How do they present themselves? How do you know when we are escalating into something else? And I just wrote the story, the whole story of, you know, their infancy, their childhood, where we were, the diagnoses we've had, the medications we've tried, the interventions we've tried. And every summer I updated that until they were in their, you know, 16, 17. And now I finally stopped updating it. I cannot even tell you. And it was like 3 or 4 pages by the time I was done. Doctors will sit there and they will read that. I'm telling you, they will read that. They sit there and they go, oh, okay. Oh, okay. Okay. Oh, oh, okay. Okay. Okay. And they go, okay, you've answered almost all my questions. Now I have 3 more. And, and what that does is it's so hard to get into a doctor. It, it allows the doctor to get enough background in order to rule out the, the most common things it could be and get up to page where up to speed with where you are on what is the next best step in this situation, especially if they're coming in after a couple of years and a couple of different doctors. And also, you're having your medical history in that succinct format with the essential details that they need without a lot of all the extra ums and ahs allows you to get a lot more time with the doctor and it raises your expertise level with that doctor. Here's the thing, the paper raises your expertise level with the doctor. You already were an expert in yourself or whoever you're caring for. You already had all of that knowledge. It's the putting it down in paper and handing it to a doctor that makes you look like you're the PhD-level person, even though you already knew that information. The paper gives you credibility. Now, when COVID first started, we gave away a portion of our medical organizing binder free for 18 months. We gave away 12 pages out of it. And at the time I thought, this is something that I can do so that people can write down so they can have Like, what can you control? You can control writing down what your medications are, your past history, you know, everything that you would need if you were gonna go to a hospital. The day after we made that free, it's no longer free, but the day after we made that free for 18 months, hospitals shut down to having anyone go to the hospital with you. I mean, I'd never heard of that before. I never thought that would happen. I couldn't believe it. And then all of the sudden I started getting emails and not that many people had downloaded it yet, But 2 people the next day sent loved ones into the ER with that medical paperwork filled out because they couldn't go in with their loved one. Now, when you go to an emergency room, it's not a field trip. Like, you're going there because you're in a life-threatening situation that you no longer can manage at home. You don't feel well and you're stressed out. You don't remember everything, and then the doctors and nurses are gonna ask you a bunch of questions. What medications are you taking? When did you last take it? What's your medical health? Like, how much easier is it when you just hand the papers over that have that information and the technicians can type it all in so the doctors and nurses can do your care? I will tell you, I have heard story after story after story of medical professionals in those early COVID days crying when they got the paperwork because they could then immediately start administering care. They just went and looked like, any allergies to this? No. Okay, start administering that care. I'm going to start typing this in. The paperwork, the written down handing of those papers to a medical professional so they could type them in and immediately start doing care saves so much time and so much stress. Not only on the patient's part, but on the medical professional's part. Story after story after story of people who create these medical binders for their loved ones and are able to use them when the 911 is called or when they go into the doctor or when they're advocating or they're getting whatever. Like, this paperwork takes the emotion out of the paperwork and the information and allows you to use your time and energy and resources in advocating, thinking, and problem solving, and in resting and in getting better. So that's why I created these two binders, was to serve those who need to be served, the patient or the family member who needs a power of attorney or a power of healthcare. But also, I mean, life is short and the unexpected happens, and we will have to settle people's estates, and we will have to, hire caregivers for our family members at some point. And if we can have a binder that will share that information between the family and the caregiver so that our loved one can get the best care, that is what these binders do. Okay, let's move on to a happier topic, shall we? The third of the essential binders is the Household Reference Binder. And this is the binder that I use at least every month, at least every month. It is the most frequently used binder I have. Mine is actually 20 years old. This is the first binder I made and used, um, when we got our house, because I was so excited to have a house. It also does work when you're renting, but it is based for a homeowner. The Household Reference binder is where you put every single thing related to your house. And how you know if it goes in the Household Reference or the Household Operations binder is the Household Reference binder is like a binder for your house, as if your house was a person. If your house was your kid, And you know, its clothes are gonna be like its landscaping and its food is gonna be like whatever. Like anything, like if you were going to sell your house tomorrow, everything in this binder you could just hand to the new homeowner and you wouldn't have to, you wouldn't worry about it. So it's gonna be all of your information about the house when you bought it, all of the improvements that you do, the colors of paint, all of that. We also include electronics in there. A lot of your electronics would stay with your house, but your TVs and your radios and phones might actually go. So you'd pull that out before you actually sold the house, but your appliances wouldn't, they would stay with the house. So all of that information is in there. For the Household Reference Binder, I would say 80% of that binder you find in your file cabinet. This is all of the manuals that you have. So here's what I do with manuals. If you are a handy person, I am not, and you can actually I can fix appliances, I cannot. Then you would maybe wanna keep your owner's manuals. I do not fix, nor can I fix any of my appliances. So I don't need my owner's manuals. So what I do is I tear off the front page of an owner's manual and I put it in the Household Reference Binder and then I put the serial number on that. And then I at least know the model and make of whatever it is I have, 'cause you can also look up those manuals online. The second thing that I do with those owner's manuals is I add in the receipt for the appliance. I add in the receipt because one, I wanna remember what I paid for it, but two, it always has the date in which I bought the appliance so that when the appliance breaks, I can go and I can see how old the appliance is to decide if I wanna replace it or if I want to try to repair it. And then any warranty information I keep in there. So you go from a thick booklet and a whole bunch of paperwork down to the front page of a booklet, a receipt, and a couple of pieces of warranty. You can see how you can get a lot more in a binder than you're going to get in a file cabinet, as long as you're not a person that would fix things. So all of that is in the household reference binder, as well as your electronics. Every time you buy electronics, write down same exact thing, all of that information, so you know how old those things are. All of your decor. If you haven't bought or sold a house in a while, uh, realtors tell me the number one question that people ask when they're going through an open house is what color is that paint? What is the color of that paint? I mean, realtors have horror stories about trying to figure out what color a paint is on a wall when they sell a house. Like, people want to know what color is it? Where'd you get it? Is it Sherwin-Williams? Is it Behr? Is it Glidden? Like, what is it? What brand? Where'd you get it? What's the name of the color? So writing that kind of information down helps you, but also really helps a lot when you sell your house. The fourth and final of the essential reference binders is the household operations binder. And the household operations binder, like I said, is about how you run your house. So this is meal planning and cleaning and event planning and holidays and vacations and pets. All that information is in there. So I'm a former teacher. I look at this like my lesson plan book. Like if I was doing a lesson plan for the family, this is where I'd have like all that stuff. So that's all of what makes your house uniquely yours. And no matter where you go, no matter how many times you move, you're probably gonna celebrate the holidays in some similar fashion. You have a certain cleaning schedule that you like, you have meals and menus that you like to serve, and your pets are obviously gonna go with you. So all of that is in the, the household operations binder. Those are the 4 essential binders that will replace your file cabinet. You could see, like, think of something else that's in your file cabinet that's not in these 4 binders. There usually is not very much. I already mentioned that the tax documentation I leave in my file cabinet, so that's in there. And then I do have kids, so we have 2 optional kids binders, and we have the Warrior Mama binder, which I explained a little bit, which is your medical and your educational information for kids. Under the age of 21 that are diagnosed and have an IEP, an individualized education plan, or a 504, or, you know, it would work for anyone, but that's how I created that one. And the other one is the Kids School Memory Binder. And the Kids School Memory Binder is like a scrapbook in a binder, super, super easy to do. I am a photo scrapbooker. I have over 300 albums that I have made for myself and other people. So I love a good scrapbook, but to put kids' artwork in a scrapbook is extremely costly and takes a long time. Our kids' memory binder, yeah, I mean, a 10-year-old can take all of their schoolwork from when they were little and they could put it in this binder in the course of a weekend. Like anybody can create these binders and Often what we tend to do with kids' artwork and kids' schoolwork is we save it in tubs by year. And my big heart about memories is that they should be shared and enjoyed. And if it's in a binder or it's— then everybody can look at it. If it's in a tub, no one's looking at it. Like a tub in your basement does you no good. Why, why even save it? Like you want your kids to enjoy this artwork. And often we save it so long that our kids are grown and gone when we finally get around to doing anything with their schoolwork or their artwork. And let me just tell you, they don't want it at that point. So the sweet spot of making a kids, um, memories binder is grade school and middle school. Like if you could start making this binder when they're like 1st, 2nd, 3rd grade and maintain it until they're in 8th grade, that is the sweet spot. They love putting things in the binder. They love looking at the binder. They could see their growth and development, all their certificates and awards and all these things you don't know what to do with all go in the binder. It's awesome. Them. If you make it for them after middle school, they will look at it when you make it, and they will love it, and they will appreciate it, but they probably will look at it maybe 1 or 2 times more, and that's it. So really, the sweet spot is to make it while your kids are in grade school and middle school and just let them make it. So that's a binder that they can use to enjoy. Binders are portable. Binders have a constraint where you can only put so much stuff in there, so you don't keep all of the manuals If you're not going to fix things, you only keep the front page and you don't keep the manuals for things that only cost $20. Like I only keep manuals, the front page of manuals for things that I would actually fix. If you would not fix it, you don't need to keep the manual unless you don't know how to use it. And in that case, just take 20 minutes, figure out how to use it, and then write yourself a little note about the things that you need, the extra things that you need. But we get manuals, you guys, with like toasters. You don't need it. Like, just because it came in the package doesn't mean you have to keep it. And when you have a binder that you're trying to keep things in, then you're like, yep, this is gone, this is gone, this is gone, because it doesn't fit. I, as you could tell, love paper. I've thought a lot about paper, and I think that paper really levels the playing field and gives you confidence and gives weight to the authority that you actually have when you're working with other professionals who are extremely costly and expensive to work with. It gives you just more confidence. So walk softly and carry a big binder, I'd say. Thanks for listening to this Organize 365 playlist. You can find more information about these podcast episodes at organize365.com/podcast. glossary. 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