As the person who takes care of our family’s finances, one thing I often worry about is what will happen when I die.  I worry that CarpenterBoy won’t be equipped to deal with everything in the event of my death.  I worry that CarpenterBoy really doesn’t have a good handle on money management, yet.  I worry that Bean will learn bad financial habits.  I worry that there won’t be enough money from my life insurance policy to take care of our debts and make life easier for my family.

For our joint accounts, I’m going to definitely need to get a few things together for them in case of emergency.  

I’ve been following a financial blog called I’ve Paid Twice for This Already (one of my favorites) for a while now, and Paid Twice just lost her father, unexpectedly.  Here, she outlines all of the things her father did well.  Apparently he was very organized, and this made things easier for her and for her mother.  They were able to take care of all of the financial matters pretty easily and quickly.

I worry about the order of my parents’ financial life.  From what I’ve seen growing up, I can’t believe they are as organized as Paid Twice’s father was.  Or as organized as I am, and as I try to be.  I’m hoping that when one or the other dies, we won’t have to search through too much to put things in order.  I don’t even know which one takes care of their bills—I think it’s my mother, but I can’t be certain.

I know my brother’s wife, LawyerGirl, is in charge of that family’s finances, and I also know she does a good job with things.  I’m not too worried about their family in case of emergency.

My sister has been following Dave Ramsey’s advice for the past 8 months, so I’m sure she’s gotten their financial life more in order lately.  In order to really do a debt snowball, you have to know what the debts are and be on top of things.  So, I’m assuming that they have things under control for the most part, although we’ve never discussed where their children would go in case of complete tragedy.

In our exact situation, the only thing we need to do to prepare for the inevitable (and sad) truth is to draw up a will (besides paying off debts).  We still have yet to do this, and Bean will be 3 on Friday.  It’s a must.  I think my goal for February should be to take care of this once and for all.

We do have life insurance for both of us, and our financial advisor is prepared to take us through the plan if either of us passes.  I also have started to fill out a worksheet for Doug, where I am outlining details (passwords, bills, etc.) of our financial life.  You can download a very good worksheet from Mrs. Micah, here.

Although it’s a difficult thing to think about, it’s something that must be done in order to provide your family with some comfort and some space to grieve.  I’d hate to leave CarpenterBoy with a mess to clean up, so I’m going to try my best to set things up for him, just in case.