Update and Free Financial Preparation Kit

Well, it’s been five days since I found out one of my credit card numbers was stolen. After using up my free credit reports from Transunion, Experian, and Equifax, I found out there were no new credit lines opened. I’ve also been checking my other credit cards often with no further suspicious activity, so I feel a bit better now. All this highlights a need to keep a backup of all your financial information, along with useful phone numbers to call in case.

This reminded me of a free Financial Preparation Kit provided by Patelco Credit Union, which I’ve been meaning to fill out for a while. It’s basically a downloadable Adobe Acrobat .pdf file that you print out, and record all of your important personal information in one place.

From their website:

With this kit, you can collect important information such as names, phone numbers, and addresses of important contacts and put it in one convenient location so that you can get to it when you need it. There are separate sections to enter financial, insurance, and investment information.

The nice thing is that it is very thorough, so you don’t forget a copy of your property deeds or old tax returns, for instance. (Print it out at work if you can!) I plan on filling this out this weekend, and sending a copy to my out-of-state parents. That way, even if some catastrophe happens (or I just do something stupid), somewhere I will have at least the contacts of all the various institutions that hold my money or that I owe money too, as well an insurance companies to bail me out of said catastrophe!

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