For the last 6 months, I’ve been knee-deep in legal paperwork.
It’s nothing bad at all.
It’s just sorting through my grandparents’ and their relatives’ estate paperwork. My grandparents have been gone for over 20 years now however, because they did not have a living will or advanced directives over their assets I – and many other family members, close and distant – have had to sort through what belongs to which family (apparently, they shared quite alot of assets amongst each other).
What complicates the matter even more is that these assets are principally located in the other side of the country. So, we are all dealing with a time as well as a distance issue.
Fortunately, I have good lawyers that are helping the process. They are communicating with my relatives’ lawyers making sure everyone’s on the same page.
But the main point of my post is that I have not gotten a sense of “free time” for the last 6 months. I’ve had to prioritize massive chunks of my time towards this issue. I couldn’t even decorate the dining room for Christmas the way I wanted to because I had so much paperwork stacked on my dining table, along with my laptop, notebooks and my iPad. My dining table became a sort of command/HQ center for everything related to this issue (coincidentally, this has made me examine the potential benefits of having a dining table as a work table moving forward – I get both unsurpassed length and depth for all my home office stuff…but then, the issue of space and where such a table would fit is something to think of).
It has made me think of the things I’ve wanted to do. Especially now that, after January ends, most of the legal paperwork will be finalized and signed off on.
There are TV shows that I want to watch like Succession, Landman, the last season of Yellowstone and its 1923 spin-off.
There are movies that I really want to sit down with and take my time appreciating or re-appreciating like Dune 1&2 with Timothee Chalamet, Sound Of Music, Lawrence Of Arabia, Saltburn, etc.
There’s books that I want to read, pictures I want to take and movies I want to create.
And finally, I want to get back to concentrating fully on my long-term goals: fixed income retirement, tying up loose ends in my personal life, solidifying what I’m happy with, etc.
You never really appreciate the concept of time until something comes up where you have to involuntarily give some or massive parts of it away. Then the struggle becomes managing the situation while trying to ground yourself in the present. If anything, I’m glad that this issue hasn’t obfuscated me to the point where I lost track of the things that really matter like close family, friends, being part of a larger social mesh, etc.
But the necessity of having to get this done was a powerful force in and of itself and did manage to bend my perception of time – especially going into the last 3 months of 2025. And of course, it goes without saying that I’ve learned just how important it is to have final directives or a written will before you pass. Just so at least no one has to clear up any doubts about who the beneficiaries of your assets are when you pass on.
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