I'm Toni
I help people put everything that matters in one place, so their family never has to go looking.
Like many, I'm a busy mum, running a household, working and doing all the things mums do every day.
What keeps me sane is being organised. It doesn't come naturally, but it keeps me on top of most of the juggle. Not all of it, but most.
My friend Marie died of breast cancer. Fast, and with no warning any of us saw coming.
Marie's husband and daughters, heavy with grief, had to spend the worst weeks of their lives…
Dying had never been a dinner-time conversation… ever. Marie was not disorganised. Like many mothers, most of it was in her head, with some things written down and some legal documents in place.
But the real stuff… the heartfelt conversations never aired… simply gone with Marie. She was healthy, she was busy, she was being a fantastic mum… and hadn't had the time to get all the things organised.
And to be honest, up until that day, neither had I.
It was simply scattered, not difficult. So I did it.
It was time to look closer to home
I sat at my own kitchen table and asked the question I'd been avoiding. If I was gone tomorrow, what would the next six months look like for my daughters? I knew where most of it was. Nobody else in my house did.
Around that time I read The Barefoot Investor. Scott Pape has a chapter about keeping a “Fearless Folder”, one place for everything that matters. It gave me somewhere to start.
What I found when I looked
I began with the will and got as far as my super, and by then it had stopped being a tidy-up. Accounts I'd forgotten I had. Insurance I couldn't explain. Passwords in three different places, none of them anywhere another person could reach. Wishes I'd said out loud once and never written down.
There was no order to work through it in. Everyone doing this starts from nothing, usually in a hurry, often too late. So I built the order.
I gave it to people I love first
My family, and my closest friends. No surveys, no focus groups. I asked them to be honest. They finished it. That's the part I care about. Most people who mean to get organised never get past the first drawer.
A little more about me
It taught me systems, deadlines and how much gets lost when nobody writes it down. I brought all of that home.
The Arts. Painting, sculpture and ceramics.
Travel. New adventures in far-flung lands.
Chocolate cake. Always.
That system is now the My Affairs Organized course. Every account, policy, document and password in one place, in the order someone else could actually follow.
I built it for my daughters. I keep building it so that no other family has to do what Marie's family did.