It All Starts with the Mail

To some of you, dealing with the mail each day is routine, something you don’t give much thought to.

For others, the mail is an overwhelming task that leaves you exasperated on a daily basis. There can be varying reasons for this – the beginnings of Alzheimer’s, multiple people getting the mail and leaving it everywhere, or simple disorganization. When mail gets ‘misplaced’ throughout the house life gets much more stressful and complicated than need be. Bills don’t get paid and extraordinary amounts of time get spent searching for things, never mind the mess.

I have been in people’s homes and in the hunt for the mail and bills, found them in kitchen drawers, on kitchen counters, in the car, in bedroom night tables, in between cushions on the couch, and so on. Sometimes it has been opened, sometimes it hasn’t. The consequences of lost/misplaced mail can be serious. For example, checks may become invalid after a certain number of days, insurance policies lapse if not paid within a certain time frame, and interest charges on credit cards mount up.

Regardless of the reason that the issue exists, the important thing to do is to establish a routine that everyone follows:

1. The mail should be sorted immediately if possible, or at the very least, get rid of the junk. This will reduce the clutter.

2. It is critical that one place be designated as the holding place for bills. It can be anything from a shoebox to a specific drawer to a priceless antique accessory. Wherever that place is, everyone - spouses, children, cleaning help, and aides –must follow the routine.

3. For those with the beginnings of Alzheimer’s or someone living with a person with Alzheimer’s, it is critical to emphasize the routine over and over again. If the person with Alzheimer’s is getting the mail, the routine that’s emphasized is simply to put all the mail in the one designated place. Someone else must do the sorting.

4. Keep a shredder handy. The following are some of the things that should be put through the shredder, not just in the wastebasket: anything with an account number on it; credit card solicitations; convenience checks that come with your credit card bill - those blank checks that they give you to use to pay other bills.

And finally, be practical. Don’t set up a system that’s too fussy for everyone to keep up with for the long haul. It doesn’t matter whether you use a stack of empty shoe boxes or this really cool $198 mail organizer I saw in a catalog, there’s one constant. The mail comes every day, and every day you’ve got to deal with it.