Absolutely! When my Dad passed, I spent my Saturdays for a couple of months organizing, separating, collecting his paperwork for destruction, saving, etc. I didn’t keep track of what I shredded vs what we ultimately had taken to a shredding service, but it was significant, not to mention what we deemed disposable without destruction. We ended up with relatively small amount of records, tax returns, that were retained. We’re getting to the end of keeping his tax returns before shredding the last ones.

We’ve taken that lesson to heart pretty well. My accountant wife is old school and believed in a hard copy of everything from the beginning of our marriage. This resulted in one four drawer and two, two drawer file cabinets full of documents. We finally embarked on a reduction effort that takes us down to three file drawers of records for us and our respective parent’s estates. To be fair there are some file boxes of some records/family specific stuff, but the legal and records for ourselves is down to a very organized and manageable state.

The only thing we really need to work on is a more organized listing of user names/passwords/accounts with automatic drafts and a summary listing of assets that describes how those assets are configured….

Be very careful overheating a paper shredder. My son had a serious house fire. It only took a few minutes away from the shredder and the fire was going.

Also, while one is thinking about being kind to one's heirs, be sure to go through your financial accounts to make sure that you have updated ownership/beneficiary info.

When a financial company gets handed a death certificate, they look no farther than to check their records for joint ownership and/or beneficiaries that were designated by the account owner prior to death. That's good news as it means those funds are not potentially hung up in probate/estate settlement, but it does also mean that the terms of the will or trust don't affect those assets.

Examples of this not working out include long-forgotten ex-spouses, rather than current spouses, inheriting assets due to old forms made out during the prior marriage never having been updated.

TL: DR - keeping your will and/or trust documents updated is necessary, but not sufficient.

quote:

Originally posted by 9mmepiphany:

quote:

Originally posted by sjtill:
There will still be a ton of "stuff" to be gotten rid of, but that will not be papers, except for some keepsake items.

You're being very considerate of your children.

I recently had to clean out my brother-in-laws house when we found him dead inside after having passed at least a month before...he was a hoarder We rented a 40 cubic yard dumpster and filled it five (5) times...yup, 200 cubic yards out of a 1500 sq foot house. Took me a couple of months

There wasn't time to go through his mail as we found it, so we just put anything that looked like documents into 27 gallon boxes and kept them for wife to go through...we end up with eight boxes.

Some of the stuff we came across included a class schedule from the local state college from 1971, some high school class notes from before that, and books from a NV restaurant from sometime in the 30s (plus a nice cranked operated adding machine)

I helped a customer a few years ago clean out his house, it was being foreclosed on, and the buyer (not him, unfortunately) was pushing him to leave,

a house just a bit smaller than what you mention, and a big garage, and 4 small outbuildings,

I was pulling guns, parts, parts kits and a shit ton of surplus out, filled up 4 pickup loads, 4-5 van loads, fill a trailer at least once, and that is not counting what he loaded up and put in storage,

I know I probably left a few loads of stuff that he could have sold, but ran out of time,

as I was 'foraging' for lack of a better term, I pushed out 3 window screens and just tossed the trash outside, countless paper magazines and catalogs, amazon boxes etc,

all this in July/August, and only 2 window units in the house

I’ve been through the “relatives hoarding” business several times.
One was when my meth-addicted brother-in-law had to be evicted from the family home. He left behind 23 cars, 3 trailers, an RV, a couple of boats, and IIRC 23 large disposal bins of assorted junk.
Next was after my mother and stepfather died, my sister still living in Mom’s house. My Mom’s second husband liked to buy stuff from garage sales and flea markets; and my sister had never parted with an article of clothing, I think.
That was only a few disposal bins and a yard sale; but the house is still littered with my sister’s stuff.

Regarding backups of electronic files:

quote:

I went all electronic pdf copies of my documents. Besides my hard drive, I have copies on 3 physical USB drives, 2 cloud services encrypted with lifetime subscriptions, and third back up cloud service

I have similar, but only one cloud (Apple iCloud) service, and another backup service (Backblaze). The physical USB drives are in three different locations. I periodically make a copy on a flash drive of the financial files for the kids.

The most difficult project has been digitizing photos. Videos were digitized already; old family photos from my side and my wife’s side are mostly done. But that only means the digitizing of the original analog prints. It is still a huge amount of work to try to identify the people in the pictures, and other information. I hope to have it done before I go.