Keeping it true
A binder doesn’t go wrong all at once
Writing it all down is the easy part. The world carries on afterwards, and nothing tells you which page stopped being true.
A binder is right on the day it’s printed, and a little less right every month after that.
So it needs twenty minutes a year. That’s the whole of it.
Nothing announces itself
A bank merges and the account numbers change. An insurer is bought and the policy is looked after by a company nobody has heard of. A phone number is given up and, months later, given to a stranger.
None of it arrives as news. It arrives as a letter that gets filed, or as nothing at all, and the page in the binder goes on saying what was true in the spring.
The numbers go first
The parts that go out of date fastest are the ones written as a row of digits. Account numbers, policy numbers, the reference on a pension.
Banks and insurers change those, and nobody rings to tell you. A wrong number is worse than a missing one: a missing number sends somebody looking, and a wrong number sends them looking in the wrong place, confidently, for an afternoon.
If there are account and policy numbers in the binder, look twice a year rather than once.
The people go out of date too
The brother who agreed to take the dog has moved and had a second child. The neighbor with the spare key sold up in March. The accountant retired.
Names last. Phone numbers change and promises get overtaken, and those are the ones a family rings.
Short, if you do it often
Go through what’s written and decide, for each thing, whether it’s still right. Most of it will be. That’s the point of doing it every year instead of every five.
The first time takes an afternoon. After that it’s twenty minutes.
Then print the pages that changed and put them in the binder in place of the old ones. Everything else is still true, so leave it alone.
Pick a date that already exists
Nobody remembers to do this on its own. Hang it on something already in the calendar: a birthday, the week the insurance renews, the evening the clocks change.
A binder nobody has opened since it was printed still beats no binder. One that was read in the spring is worth a great deal more.
You can read a finished binder before you spend anything: the example binder.