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What to Keep When a Loved One Passes Away
Losing someone close to you is never easy, and it’s best not to rush the grieving process. If you inherited a home or are responsible for allocating their belongings, it can be overwhelming to decide what to do with the personal effects. This guide can help you through the decision-making process.
Documents to Hold Onto
While you know certain documents are necessary to keep, what about others? It can be confusing to decide.
Among the essential documents are tax forms and ID. Keeping a loved one’s tax returns for six years is necessary, just in case the CRA decides to run an audit. Identification, such as a passport, might be needed to prove your family member’s identity, so hold onto and store them with the death certificate.
Did your loved one have a business? The associated papers are ones you will likely want to keep. If in doubt, contact a business lawyer to confirm what to keep.
If your loved one was retired, retain the associated paperwork. That way, you can take care of any payments when dividing assets. Finally, collect their household bills and go through each one to close the respective accounts.
What about Personal Items?
Personal belongings are another area that you will have to decide what to keep after they pass away. Photographs are among the most important things.
Hanging onto the photos or giving them to someone who appreciates them is a way to honour your loved one. The photos may be ones given to them by their elders and be family heirlooms that continue from generation to generation.
Jewelry is another item that people often hold onto, and these items can help you feel close to the loved one. Even if you do not wear the brooch or other object, it can be something that you give to your kids at some point to keep in the family.
Antiques and fancy glassware or dishes are also something many people and use as a remembrance of the deceased family member. Keeping special items like these can help you keep them close.
You may also notice shelves, tables, and other surfaces with ornaments. Selecting those that remind you of them can make these seemingly ordinary items take on extra meaning. Perhaps you display them in your home or include them in a memory box.
Making Decisions about What to Keep
While you might consider keeping everything, that is not practical, and having all your loved one’s effects in storage where you don’t see it is not honoring them. Instead, the best thing to do is choose the items that hold the most meaning for you.
For example, if your grandmother’s teapot collection reminds you of the cups of tea shared, hold onto one of the teapots rather than all ten of them. You may feel guilty for letting go of some items but be gentle with yourself and remember that your loved one would not expect you to keep everything. Keep what makes you smile and divide the possessions with family and friends who want keepsakes too.
Bringing in the support of a professional organizer can help make the process easier and less emotionally overwhelming, especially if there are a lot of possessions. The expert can help you break the process down into manageable steps and short organizing sessions. We never force you to go faster than you want; instead, we are here to help you decide what feels important and meaningful to keep.
We hold onto many items out of sentimentality. Maybe it belonged to a loved one. Perhaps you still hold on to those old high school awards. When was the last time you even looked at them? Will your loved ones want them when you are gone? Choose just a couple of these items and purge the rest. ClutterBGone knows how to make sure those memories are with you without the clutter.
Wow! Eighty percent off something that I may need at some point? Who could pass that up? You should. Even eight percent off is still too much to pay for something you just don’t need. Besides, there will always be a sale at some point. If you truly want to live clutter free, then purchase only what you need and when you need it. Keep in mind that everything you buy requires some maintenance whether it is cleaning, dusting or moving it around and it takes up valuable space too.
If you were organizing in the kitchen you would sort all your pots, pans, utensils and such to see just how much you had of each. When doing a closet sort your shirts or blouses, dresses, pants, etc. You really don’t know how much you have of something until you see it all laid out in front of you.
Remember to store items in containers using the smallest possible container that will house all the items in a particular category. Most professional organizers will carry an inventory of commonly used containers to save time.
Organizing and decluttering isn’t a sprint. The clutter in your life didn’t appear overnight. Pick a room or a space that gives you the most grief and start there. Stay with that area until it’s complete. Now stand back and realize what you have accomplished. This will give you added energy to move on to the next space.
They forgot they had it or quickly need it and couldn’t find it, so they run off to the store to purchase another one and now have more than 2 or 3 of the same items. These items are easy to make decisions about. They are the perfect candidates to sell, donate or give away.
Do you want to have more time to spend with your family or friends? Do you want to reduce your frustration and anxiety levels when you can’t find things? Will being more organized improve your relationships? Will you save money on past due and interest charges and improve your credit rating? Whatever the reason, write them down and keep the list in a conspicuous place until the task is completed. It will be a constant reminder to you.
Many people don’t understand just how much money you can save by being organized. Bills will be paid on time thereby saving late fees. Your credit score will improve as well. You won’t be buying duplicates of items that you can’t find but know you have somewhere. In more than one case we found cheques that were misplaced! Luckily, they weren’t stale dated yet.
Once you are organized you’ll find you have the time to do things you love or always wanted to do. You’ll have the time to hit the gym or meet up with friends or sometime for a quick walk at lunch time. Many of us don’t do these things because we “don’t have the time”. Let us help you find that time.
The shopping centers will confirm that a lot of you put off the holiday shopping until the last minute. Set some time aside to get it done earlier. Calendarize it if you need to and treat it like an appointment – no changes. Arrange a babysitter if need be or if you’re able to book an afternoon off work, even better. The shopping malls get crazy with each passing day, as you know. Last minute shopping is the perfect recipe for stress over the holidays and for purchasing items that tend to lead to clutter.
It’s easy to say the whole house but there is one room that is causing you the most grief. One room that is resulting in more misplaced items, more lost productivity, one room that became a drop zone, maybe even one room that looks the worse than the others.
Once the organizing process starts you are going to have items that you want or need to keep but rarely use. These items will need to be stored away. Do you have the space for the storage of items? Do you have the materials required to store items like shelving or containers? The area that you use for storing unused items must also be organized in a way that makes it easy to find and retrieve items.
The home may always look like a bomb has gone off. Even though your home may be clean, clutter can make it look messy and dirty. If one partner is a neat freak and the other let’s clutter dominate then we have a recipe for arguments. Let’s clear out the clutter, get organized and reduce the things that put a strain on relationships. Lord knows there is enough of those already!
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