Tips For Parents From Firefighters

Today we saw a tip from Jackson Fire Department's Facebook page that was so good we wanted to share it with our readers. 

Here is the tip they wrote for parents copied directly from their Facebook page:

"Too often firefighters come upon a vehicle accident where the parent(s) are unconscious and there are children in the car who are too young to communicate useful information. Here is a tip for all you parents out there: place a sticker on each child's car seat providing firefighters and emergency personnel valuable information such as child's name, DOB, parents names, emergency contact information, any medical conditions the child may have and medications. Also, please remember to update this information as needed. As first responders, we do thoroughly look at the car seats after a traffic collision, they can tell us a lot about the damage suffered and the impact itself. We will find these stickers if you place them in a spot where the information is not easily seen from the outside of the car if you are worried about others having that information."

Personal Health Record

Many of us in the sandwich generation are trying to manage our own health as well as helping our elderly loved one's health and children's too.  It can be very overwhelming.  So overwhelming that often times we forgo keeping our own health on track.  

 

The thought of keeping a personal health record for ourselves and others in the family falls way down the priority list...until something happens.  But in this blog by the Mayo Clinic, they highly recommend that everyone keep a personal health record and make sure that record is available even in an emergency.  That's easier said than done.

Tax Records - How long do I have to hold onto them?

It's tax time.  And when we finish the taxes, many of us pack away the records we kept for the past year.  But what about those old records from years ago?  Do we still have to keep them in the basement or in the back of a closet? Can we throw them away?

If you perform an online search for "document retention guidelines" you'll find a lot of information regarding document storage periods, but you have to dig pretty deep to find hard and fast rules.  Even then you may come up empty-handed.

Even the irs.gov site has an "it depends" clause. So how long should you keep documents?  Well, we did some of that research for you and included our findings in a checklist that we provide to anyone who might find it useful.