Today’s topic is one I dealt with recently: Having your affairs in order.

By this, I don’t just mean having your will or beneficiary designations done (although those are important). I also mean having your executor know where to find these documents. Being the executor of someone’s estate isn’t a glamorous job, and it’s usually given to a family member or loved one. My executor, for example, is my oldest son, Vincent.

"You’d be surprised at what can go wrong by simply
not having the proper designation for your beneficiaries on record."

While I hope it’s a long time before he has to fulfill this obligation, I bring this topic up because Hurricane Laura recently swept through our region and did a lot of damage in parts of Louisiana. If something were to happen to you, do your heirs know where to find all of the important information regarding your estate? I’m talking about wills, bank statements, passports, lockboxes, etc.

At Green Financial Group, we’re doing beneficiary designation checks for all our clients during September. You’d be surprised at what can go wrong by simply not having the proper designation for your beneficiaries on record. I’ve seen lawsuits and all kinds of other bad stuff happen because of this. We also offer a cloud-based storage system called “The Vault” where our clients can store their information. For example, if one of them lost their passport overseas, they can access it via The Vault and resume their travel schedule.

It’s important to have a system like this in place, and I recommend that your system is cloud-based. Anything can happen to a hard document, so have a physical storage space for your hard documents and a virtual storage space for that information as well. This will save your heirs a lot of time and heartache if, God forbid, something should happen to you. Let’s not make that situation any harder on them than it has to be.

If you need help putting your affairs in order or have any other questions, don’t hesitate to reach out to me. I’d love to help you. Until then, stay the course.

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