Papers in Order

Printable pages for families

Find the papers. Keep the stories.

For grown children helping a parent, and for anyone who wants the household's papers in one place somebody else could follow. Everything here is printed at home and filled in by hand.

The printables

Start where you need to

Compare them in the shop ›

Sets

Save with a set

Compare the sets ›

Need more than one guide? They also come in sets, for less than buying them one at a time.

5 PDFs127 pages

All Five Guides

Every single-topic guide: medical, emergency, where it's kept, a letter to the family and an executor's checklist.

$28.99 $43.95 if bought separately

See the set

How it works

Print it tonight, fill it in over time

  1. Choose the pages

    Start with the free 10-page starter, the 84-page Family Binder kit, or the My Life Story workbook for a parent's stories.

  2. Print at home

    US Letter PDFs, in color or black and white. The free starter opens right away; a paid PDF arrives by email within minutes. The kit and My Life Story can also be filled in on screen.

  3. Fill in one page at a time

    Emergency contacts first, or ten easy questions for Mom. Nobody finishes in one sitting, and that is fine.

What to do tonight

  1. Get a one-inch binder and a pen. Nothing else is needed to start.
  2. Print the free ten-page starter and put the pages in the binder in the order they come.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.

And while you are sitting together, ask a question or two about the old days. The questions to ask your mom and the grandparent interview questions are free to read and print.

From the blog

Read before you print

All posts ›

Papers & caregiving

More on papers and caregiving ›

Family stories

All 8 question lists ›

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.