The Nightmare of Paperwork

Am I the only one who does this?

You get bank statements, retirement account statements, 529 plan statements in the mail. You throw them in a pile. I'll look at those later.

The pile gets picked up after it has overtaken the dining table, and gets put into a box. If I need that stuff, I know where to find it.

Wash, rinse, repeat.

At our meeting with the lawyer last week he told us that we needed to produce financial documents to show what we have coming in and going out. Including all of our retirement accounts.

Which.... are ..... of course..... all in boxes or still piled on the dining table because there is mail there for about the last 2 quarters.

We don't eat much at the dining table.

So on Monday, Doug went to work and I went to ... work... on the piles.

After about an hour I found all the most RECENT things, but we needed to produce all of our paperwork since the beginning of this fiasco, so going back to December 2008.

Um.

I started to hyperventilate a bit. Then I started to feel my throat tighten and sweat.

I'll never be able to find all this stuff. I went into the bathroom, leaned over the toilet and couldn't puke. It just wouldn't happen. But the bathroom seemed to smell super funky to me, so I stopped what I was doing and cleaned the bathroom. Then, I did dishes. Then I took a nap.

My lawyer sent a "um, guys? paperwork please?" update email on Tuesday afternoon and I decided, hey... it's the freaking 21st century. I'm going to get all this stuff online. Like a modern boss.

In 2004 we consolidated all our 401(k)s into one account, so that was with Ameriprise. We've gone through 4 financial advisers since then. These kids come in, are all cool and nice, and then they move on to other pastures. Last time I talked with one was like February when they called to let us know we had a new contact. Well, today I called him and got a girl, and she is our new adviser I guess, for now.  She was super helpful and said she would overnight all our statements back to January 2009 to our lawyer and send a copy to us, no charge... Cool. But going beyond January 2009 meant archives, so we needed to set up online accounts.


So I did that, like a boss.

Then, Doug has some accounts that cannot be rolled into the Roth IRA, because of the type of account they are. they are 403(b) accounts. And they can't even be combined. So he has the one from When he used to work at the college and another from when he worked at Big Boston Hospital. According to this statement, he has 4 IDs. It made my head explode, so I'm going to have him deal with that nonsense when he gets home. I just can't.

I then found email correspondence that I had with the Attorney General's office, which kind of didn't do anything but it shows that I reached out there and provided info to them. I found other email that I'd had discussions with other people.

My poor lawyer's email box must be exploding.

Fingers crossed. Wish us luck...