Financial Clutter | Organizing Goddess - Part 2

Change for Good

Have you ever come back from a foreign trip with leftover currency? If you travel abroad frequently, then you might want to keep the currency and bring it on your next trip to that country. However, if you don’t expect to go back to that country in the foreseeable future, you probably want to do something with it so that it doesn’t become clutter. Bills can be exchanged for dollars at banks that handles currency exchange, but they won’t accept…

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Let’s Start at the Very Beginning

Remember back to last spring when you were preparing your taxes. Pretty annoying, right? Didn’t you hate digging through all your papers to find relevant information, some of which was already more than a year old? I bet you made a vow back then that you were going to be more proactive in the future. January is a great time to get things set up for a smooth tax process. As I described in Reducing the Pain of Tax Time, setting up some…

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My Credit Card Travels More Than I Do

The first time I experienced credit card fraud was in 1982.  I opened my bill to discover that I had charged $1,100 at Pit Number One in Atlantic City.  The trouble is that I had never been to Atlantic City. This was back in the days before the Internet (yes, children, there was such a time) and way before we did on-line shopping.  Maybe that’s why I’m not fearful about using my credit card number on-line.  I know that these kinds…

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Gems Among the Stocking Stuffers

As a Professional Organizer, I find the holiday season agonizing.  So much emphasis on shopping — buying things that will be given to people who probably don’t even want them. I love getting my weekly e-mails from the Container Store, but when they sent me one about this year’s collection of “Stocking Stuffers”, I got nervous. Stocking stuffers are the ultimate junky gift — emphasizing quantity and low price over quality.  The Container Store offers free shipping if you order $100 worth…

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Your Digital Afterlife

One of the most eye-opening sessions that I attended earlier this year at the annual conference of the National Association of Professional Organizers (NAPO) was entitled “Creating a Will for your Virtual Life”.   Heather Ahern, a Massachusetts-based Professional Organizer, said that you should create a digital estate plan to ensure the appropriate disposition of your digital assets, just as you would do with your tangible assets. Since attending that session, I’ve come across a number of articles — in AARP…

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