Maine (WABI) – Where do you keep your vital documents?
We’re talking about home insurance information, passwords, or a health care power of attorney.
For most of us, the answer is online.
A recent survey conducted by AARP shows that many older Mainers are reluctant to fully embrace technology, especially when it comes to digitizing important documents.
For some, it comes down to data privacy concerns.
But others say they simply don’t know how to do it.
Joy Hollowell joins us now to help those who haven’t yet gotten their digital lives in order.
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“In the past, you may have had a folder of files that you kept in a filing cabinet,” says Tom Kamber, executive director of AARP Senior Technology Services.
Fortunately, the world of technology has virtually eliminated the need for all that organizational paperwork. Now, if we want to access our home insurance, bank statements or health information, it’s just a click away.
“And that becomes the new norm that people expect,” Kamber says. “That’s why it’s very important that we figure out what these documents should be, what passwords, and how we’re going to manage the passwords to protect the documents.”
But for some, that can be a daunting task. so much so that they postponed it.
“The problem, of course, is that when something goes wrong, let’s say you end up having a dementia problem, as many of us do when we get older, once you have a problem, it’s too late,” Kamber says.
AARP has proposed five steps to help everyone, especially seniors, get their digital house in order. Each step is designed to take less than an hour, with the goal of completing them all in five days.
Step one focuses on your cell phone and privacy settings. Make sure you know what apps are on your phone and what personal information you are sharing.
Step two you are managing your login credentials. A password manager can help store and protect all your different passwords in one place. It can also suggest strong passwords and monitor data breaches among existing ones.
Step three It involves setting up your social media – controlling what you share online and with whom.
Step four and five Get to the heart of the matter: converting your paper files to digital. Keep in mind who besides yourself will need to access them.
“A technology has recently come out that AARP is using a lot: they’re called digital vaults,” Kamber explains. “The nice thing about digital vaults is that they allow you to grant access to certain documents to certain people. So if it’s my health information or my financial information, I can put it in a digital vault and put it behind a password. But I can set that access so that my wife or my daughter can have access to the approved documents. And I can limit it to just these people and these purposes.”>
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To get started, log in to seniorplanet.org/digitalhousecleaning/
It is free to use.
There, you will see the steps mentioned along with links to instructional videos and other tools that will guide you through the entire process.
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