I built a tool that changed my life
A year and a half ago, I found myself surrounded by chaos. I had spent weeks scraping together W2s, all the 10-whatever-whatever forms, and trying to remember how much we’d donated to charities. I gathered every document I needed to do my taxes (including scanning them all and organizing them for our CPA). And this isn’t the only time I found myself in over my head trying to gather important documents. Registering our twins for kindergarten required birth certificates, shot records, and health assessment forms.
I’m an organized person. I like things in their place. Order makes me feel in control. With a husband, two little girls, two full-time jobs, two vehicles, shared benefits, several bank and retirement accounts, medical bills… it’s a struggle to stay on top of all the things.
Today, I’m sharing the app I built, Look at Me Adulting (LAMA), hoping it can help others experiencing the same challenges. LAMA has become central to the order I now feel in life and, therefore, my peace of mind. Here are the ways it changed my life.
Paper-freedom
We all have a pile of papers somewhere in our house that always seems to accumulate. Mine was on my desk in my home office. Mail, papers from the kids’ school, various other appointment reminders… that pile on my desk was the biggest culprit of chaos. If we got a medical bill in the mail, I tossed it onto the pile to deal with later. If I opened a piece of mail that I wasn’t sure was important or not, I added it to the pile. If the girls brought something cute home from school, it went into the pile. Every few weeks, I mustered up the motivation to sort through this pile that had taken on a life of its own!
With LAMA, I own the pile instead of it owning me! I scan and send things to LAMA as soon as I receive them. Every two weeks, I get a reminder to take a few minutes to sort through my “TBD Pile.” I can deal with each file one by one—paying and saving bills, tagging and organizing files worth saving, or deleting things that are no longer important. Ah, it’s so refreshing every time.
One click to organize taxes
It never ceases to amaze me how long it takes to gather all the documents needed to file taxes every year. Locating everything, scanning each file into the computer, and organizing them into a shareable PDF to send to our CPA takes far longer than expected.
Now, I scan them all directly into LAMA, mark them as tax documents, and share them securely with our CPA with just one click. 🙌
Medical bill tracking
Since starting a family, I’ve quickly learned how scattered the medical billing process is. When my daughter fractured her leg, we got several bills, from different organizations, with different ways to pay. And all for the same medical event.
With LAMA, I associated them all with a ‘Fractured Leg’ tag, paid them one by one, and tracked the total amount of the event. Bonus: seeing how much we spend on medical bills in a given year helped determine which insurance plan to select the following year.
Digital wallet
Raise your hand if you’ve ever been caught at a doctor’s appointment without your insurance card or at the airline ticket counter without a birth certificate for your lap child. 🙋♀️
Not anymore! With LAMA, I have pictures of all these documents and cards on my phone. I pinned them to my dashboard so that they’re easy to locate in a pinch. Adulting at its finest, right?!
LAMA now takes care of the boring parts of life so I can enjoy and care for the things that need real attention. LAMA handles tracking medical bills so that I can give my daughters extra hugs during an ER visit. LAMA reminds me to organize documents, so I can keep our house clutter-free. LAMA gathers everything needed to file taxes quickly, so I can focus on learning ways to optimize our return.
There’s no better feeling than relieving unnecessary brain clutter in favor of enjoying the more important parts of life, and with minimal effort!
