Make A List

Make A List

If you had to make a list of all the things family members would need to know if you suddenly went away, what would it include?  Accounts, passwords, poems, feelings never shared.  It would be too easy to just turn on the maudlin faucet for this one, so I am just spinning out the obscure details that have started popping up since I heard for the second time, "I need to know about that," from a certain someone.

The subject at hand was the explanation for a fund available to each of us (my wife and myself) from my former employer since I had been a certain age when they eliminated their own medigap plan for retirees 65 and over in 2000.  Creating this fund relieved my employer of the necessity to go on administering a plan for a population of retiring employees that will, for lack of a better expression, die off slowly over the coming forty to fifty years.

Leaving a lump sum to cover such a plan for a year or two when purchased on the open market let my employer drop this plan a bit less painfully.  Do companies really feel pain when they eliminate a costly benefit?   Probably not, but a sense of fair play does show up in decisions like this one made by my former employer.

The other subject it raised was a savings plan (including some company match) that same company set up when it had (a few years earlier) eliminated health benefits for retirees under 65.  I need to create an easy-to-follow file for accessing that one.  

That leads to the various pensions that trickle in from older former employers (are the employers I worked for and left earlier in my career "older employers?").   Well, that depends on who's working there now, but I expect all the employees are younger than yours truly.  The employer itself has also been in existence longer now than it had been when I left them, so are they an "older employer?"  The company I most recently left has been around for more than 160 years, so it is, in fact, my oldest employer.   They are all my former employers, but some are "former-er" than others, and one is the "former-est" (Don't look at me, "more former" and "most former" don't sound much better to me).  If indeed she survives being married to me that long, she'll need some guidance on how to contact these pension funds to stop my pension and claim her surviving spouse's benefit.

I am satisfied that Social Security will over-communicate with her on the subject of those survivor benefits.  I have been buried in paper over just becoming eligible for medicare, so if they are still in existence when I expire, she will get all the help she needs from then for Social Security and Medicare benefits.  I have to go back for just a second--"expire"--isn't that just the best expression for kicking the bucket you've ever heard?  It has lots of layers.  Is it like an old magazine subscription that expires and stops showing up?  Or is it like an out-of-date prescription medication hanging around your medicine cabinet too long--too old to be trusted any more?  OK, there's a rabbit trail we don't need to follow.  (Or is it like a free offer on some kind of free product its maker wants you to get hooked on?)

Back to the list, do you have a list of all your latest passwords for accounts, newsletters, web sites, e-mail accounts, old blogs--set up, but abandoned for a while, etc., etc.  How else will they ever find out the balance you owe or they owe you if you don't provide usernames and passwords (BTW. "username" does not yet pass muster with s p e l l  c h e c k e r s,  i t  s h o u l d  b e " u s e r  n a m e--isthatenoughspacesforyou,spellcheck?).  Come to think of it, BTW probably doesn't work for the spellcheckers either (note the space eliminated in the name of spell checkers, I may just win this one).  I kid you not, I just went to spell check and I got this message--"An error occurred while trying to perform this function, please try again later."  Yes...

Then there are the mysteries of bill payer functions in your checking account.  What's the difference between autopay of e-bills and automatic recurring payments, and what about autopay of minimum payment due on certain credit card accounts?  Some of this I set up myself and can't exactly explain.  Maybe this one needs some work before sharing....

Old email accounts--how many of you have set up an "ad/junk mail receiving account?  Some of these web sites want us to use our email address as a username, which allows them to send a multitude of ads, special offers and other useless news about special rates to Aruba in July, etc.  I have a different email I never really visit that gets all that junk.  Old blogs--I have set up and not really made public a blog or two over the past few years where works in progress are stored--you may not believe it, but there even worse poems I have written that are sitting there in case I ever want to try to salvage them.  

It goes on, but I have to stop for a while and go somewhere.