A home for household documents.
What to keep, what to shred, where the original should live, and what your family will need to find.
Read the Papers posts ›Less searching, more peace of mind
Start here.
One binder for the documents, the medical notes, the bills and the passwords — so nobody has to hunt through a filing cabinet during a bad week. If you landed from a pin and don't know where to begin, begin on this page.
Ten printable pagesDark ink, no solid color blocksFree, no account needed
What this site is
A small site about one job: getting family paperwork into an order somebody else could follow.
It is written for two readers. One is putting a household's papers in order for the first time — the deeds, the policies, the tax records, the accounts tied to the house. The other is helping an aging parent, and needs the contacts and the medical page before anything else.
Everything here is made to be printed and filled in by hand. Clear type, dark ink with light shading, no solid color blocks, easy on a home printer.
What to do tonight
- Get a one-inch binder and a pen. Nothing else is needed to start.
- Print the free ten-page starter and put the pages in the binder in the order they come.
- Fill in Emergency Contacts first. Doctors, pharmacy, the neighbor with a key, the two people who must be called. It is the page that gets used first and it is the fastest to finish.
- Put the binder where the household already looks — a kitchen shelf, not a box in the basement.
Then stop for the night. The Master Document Inventory — what each document is, where the original lives, whether a copy exists — is done a category at a time, over a few evenings. Nobody finishes it in one sitting, and that's fine.
If you are helping a parent
Same binder, different order of operations: contacts and the medical page first, then filing and shredding. The caregiver checklist sorts the work into daily, weekly and monthly, and the medical binder pages cover what to track for one person. Filing can wait until the week is calmer.
Two sections, one reader
One less thing to hold in your head.
Checklists and schedules for anyone helping an aging parent, including the parts siblings have to share.
Read the Caregiving posts ›Latest posts
All posts ›
Important Documents Organization: What to Keep and What to Shred
Important documents organization by retention period: what to keep forever, what to keep a year or three, what to shred, and where the originals belong.
Read it ›
Medical Binder Printables: How to Track a Family's Health Records
Medical binder printables and how to use them: one page per person, a medication list, an appointment log, insurance details and what to grab on the way out.
Read it ›
What to Put in a Home Management Binder: The 6 Sections That Cover Everything
What to put in a home management binder: six sections for documents, medical notes, money, home, contacts and passwords, and what to leave out.
Read it ›
Home Management Binder Free Printables: 10 Pages to Print Tonight
Home management binder free printables: ten plain pages for documents, contacts, medical notes, bills and accounts, with how to print and assemble them.
Read it ›
Everything My Family Needs to Know: A Binder for Important Documents
Important documents organization for your family: a calm, practical binder so everyone knows where things are and who to call. Seven sections, three short sittings.
Read it ›
Caregiver Checklist: Daily, Weekly and Monthly Tasks for Helping a Parent
A printable-style caregiver checklist sorted by day, week and month, plus a one-page handoff sheet for whoever covers your shift.
Read it ›Who writes this
No byline, and no invented expert. This is an anonymous small publisher: one person writing organizing checklists and printable pages, not a lawyer, accountant or clinician. Where a page states a rule — how long to keep a tax record, for example — it names the agency the rule comes from, so you can check it yourself instead of trusting a name.
What that means in practice: the materials here are organizing templates, not legal, tax, financial or medical advice. See the disclaimer.