Getting rid of paper and more purging

Posted on by Lea Ann Reynolds

Ahh, the holidays are over and now we can get back to the final stages of prep for this journey. We pulled the remaining piles of paperwork (what Chuck calls his filing cabinet) out of the closet and have started the scanning. This started out as a 2 drawer filing cabinet down to a large accordion folder. Since we wont be able to carry any of this with us, and some items we might need access to, we are moving everything pertinent and important from paper format to electronic and will store it on the cloud under a secure location. We found a nice shredder in the condo so we will then shred as much as we can bring ourselves to do, including many credit cards. Only minor stuff like birth certificates, marriage license, etc will be kept in a safe. You know, all that important stuff. 

Started out nice and neat. Not so much now.

Chuck’s patience will prevail as he figures out my method of organization

We have gone back to the creating of “piles”. One for discard/trash, one for storage, one for packing/taking with us and the last one is “don’t know what to do with it” pile. This section will include stuff that we cant take with us, we really don’t want to keep it but we just hate to throw it away. I’m sure that’s why almost every household has a “junk drawer”, right? Well, this time around, we’ll have to do SOMETHING with it so it will eventually get moved to one of these piles. 

The sorting begins!

 Bathrooms, toiletries, makeup (mine not Chucks!) and first aid items are next on the list. How much do we take? How much can we take. I’m sure there will be clinics and a so called Walgreen’s on every corner outside the U.S. right? We just need to take something that will get us through the minor aches, pains, scratches and cuts so that we don’t have to try to find one of these stores on the fly.

Most of these are going with us. Steamer, sunblock with insect repellent, locks, etc.
Chuck is making phone calls to compare emergency medical international insurance. So far, $5000 year for the both of us. Not bad. That doesn’t cover us in the U.S. and is only for emergency care. Medicare wont cover outside the U.S. and I’m too young for Medicare anyway. We wont have regular doctor visits like we are accustomed to so guess we need to make sure we stay healthy but we’ll make sure we visit our primary doctors while in the U.S although we’ll have to pay the cash price. We’ll also look into travel insurance to cover items such as lost luggage (remember, the majority of everything we will own will be in our luggage), cancellation of flights and emergency evacuations for medical reasons, trip interruption and many other items related to travel emergencies. We’ll need to get this coverage started by April when we leave. The key is to get all our medical appointments done, prescriptions filled, dental appointments done and anything medically necessary that we can think of complete before we leave. Oh joy! But, very necessary.

It seems hairy right now but we can see it all coming together. We’ll soon be on our way as we watch the clock ticking down one day at a time. 

May God bless you all!

Chuck & Lea Ann




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