Imagine you need to be rushed to a nearby hospital. You will be away for a few weeks, maybe longer. You cannot communicate properly with anyone because you are too ill or in a coma. Suddenly out-of-the-blue you are not around to care for your loved ones and keep family life and perhaps even a business running smoothly. Bills are not being paid because your family do now know what needs to be paid and they do not have the access codes to log into your bank account and pay bills for you. You could be in danger of losing your home if the rent is not paid. The person who takes your children to school is off sick and you have not made plans for such an eventuality. Your business is crashing because no plans have been put in place to keep it running in the event of your long absence. Things are going wrong in your holiday home and there is a problem with the water and your tenants don’t know where the water mains are or who your plumber is. They can’t find the spare keys and have locked themselves out of the house. Take whatever your situation is in your household and ask yourself …

“If I am not around, have I put the systems in place to ensure that life continues to run smoothy or what kinds of chaos and stress could result … how can I prepare and prevent my world falling apart if something happens to me?”

You can do this, easily, by creating and up-dating a FileOfLife which serves as a record of all the important procedures and documents required to keep your life running smoothly no matter where you are or in what state. Think of it as possibly the most important insurance policy you will ever have. One day when you pass on, those in mourning will not have the painful task of rummaging through all your things to look for documents required to wind up your estate.

If they do not know you have an insurance policy or where to find it, they cannot claim the benefits. Billions sit in different insurance and funeral policy funds, unclaimed because beneficiaries do not know of their existence. If they cannot find your will, the state decides who gets what and it takes many more months to wind up your estate during which time you cannot sell or dispose of any of the assets. You have to keep paying on-going house maintenance costs and the heirs cannot receive their inheritance – and it costs huge amounts in time and money if executors have to track down missing documents required by the courts. Instead, your File of Life portfolio, if complete and up-to-date, can be used to negotiate substantial reductions in executor fees which run into thousands.

I was living alone when I got hit by covid in 2021. I was feeling exhausted and pretty ill so after being tested positive by a testing unit I went to, I went straight to the emergency room of a hospital nearby and within an hour I was covered with a huge glass or plastic casing which oxygen was pumped into as x-rays had shown I had covid pneumonia in both lungs. Before being wheeled into an overcrowded room and hooked up to some kind of breathing device, they allowed me to call to my parents so I could tell them where I was. I knew that many people do not survive being on ventilators and my worst fears came true. I was told that if I did not go on one, I would die. I was given a tracheostomy and hooked up into a machine to keep me alive. They put me into an induced coma for two and a half weeks. I found out about this later and also that I had nearly died three times. Fortunately, I had already had the discussion with my family years ago that should I end up needing to be kept alive by a machine, that it should only be if there was no other option and only for a few weeks, after which they must allow me to pass on naturally. I could never, ever have left them with the responsibility of deciding when the plug should be pulled out because they would have felt they had killed me and none of us could live with that. I felt It had to be me who had to decide if I was willing to be on life support indefinatelyy, or not. Many leave it up to their doctor. I have included a Living Will/Advance Care Directive in your Portfolio so that you can prepare for an unexpected situation like this and have that important discussion with your doctor and your loved ones now.

During the many weeks I was fighting for my life, I lost all muscle movement and was unable to write. I could not speak because of all the tubes. I had no means of communicating with the world around me. I had no control of my body or anything in my life. It took me weeks to regain the strength to even feed myself let alone get out of bed. There was absolutely no way that I could ask anyone to do anything for me on the home front to ensure my life was not crumbling around me while I was incapacitated.

Fortunately, I had already been working on creating the File of Life product and my father had everything on a memory stick and knew where to find printed records at my home. Because he had access to all my important records, he was able to:

1) Give my animals the correct pet food and portions and knew who the vet was in case they got sick. He knew what made them scared (loud noises) and what they loved (their tummy and chin being tickled); what they liked to play with and so on.

2) Pay all my bills that were not being paid by debit orders so my electricity did not get cut off

3) There was a problem with the pool but he was able to look up who serviced it and get it sorted out

4) He was able to get hold of the gardener to keep the property maintained

5) He had a list of my friends and their contact details so he could get hold of them and tell them not to worry that they could not get hold of me and explained why I was not returning the calls of people I usually spoke to regularly

6) He was able to keep my business going and to access anything that required a password and login details.

7) He was even able to see to that all the SARS government forms for VAT and PAYE were completed and so on.

The list is long – just imagine all the aspects that someone would need to take care of in your absence, if you had children or anyone else you needed to take care of living at home.

Before I created the file Of Life Portfolio, I had quite a few different files where paperwork was stored but many of my records were only on my computer and in numerous folders on my laptop which I took with me when I travelled. I knew where everything was but nobody else did and would have had to spend weeks tracking everything down.

I did not have to worry about my life outside of my room in high care at the hospital. My father had a copy of my FileOfLife and he and my cousin were able to take care of everything to the extent that when I eventually returned home, it was as if I had never left. I knew that if I died, they had everything they needed to wind up my estate easily and quickly, and that they would not have to spend months and years searching for important missing documentation.

A FileOfLife is essential when you die but also invaluable while you live.