Life Admin Life Hacks

This episode will give you all the hacks to ensure your pets are a stress reducer not a stress inducer

Looking after a pet properly is a long term proposition. Cats and dogs live on average 10 human years and the responsibility of their welfare adds up over time. It's important to think about how to make it easier for yourself and use your life admin systems to share it with other members of your family. 

Mia and Dinah discuss:

• all the admin related to pet ownership, including:
  • pet registration
  • purchasing pet food
  • veterinarian visits
  • pet insurance
  • grooming
  • obedience training
  • exercise
  • pet daycare
  • putting together a pet emergency kit
  • holiday care.
• how to use your life admin systems including cloud storage, shared calendars, To-Do Lists and Reference Lists to make all your pet admin as simple as possible
• other hacks including pet supply subscription services, online options for obedience training and sharing the load with friends with pets.

RESOURCES

Money Smart advice on pet ownership including pet insurance

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This episode will inspire you to find the small steps necessary to hack your life admin in challenging times.

This episode addresses the challenges introduced by the COVID-19 pandemic and the dilemma of feeling like extra time at home should lead to some major life admin overhauls versus the economic, emotional and physical impact of living in this limbo state.

They acknowledge that the answer may be small steps and incremental change, which build over time to something substantial.

Mia and Dinah discuss:

• using the current crisis as a time to think about what you wish to change and becoming clear on your aspirations 
• the key steps in BJ Fogg’s book Tiny Habits and how these habit formation principles can apply to life admin
• how motivation, ability and triggers work to form new habits, and that realising you first need to learn a new skill and simply practising it can be a huge first step
• the small steps they have been taking to improve their life admin during isolation including changes to scheduling, meal planning and digital photos.

RESOURCES

Podcast: The One You Feed, Eric Zimmer

Book: Tiny Habits, BJ Fogg

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Find out how much life insurance cover you need and what to do if you need to get some more.

This episode talks about how to find out how much cover you already have, how to estimate how much cover you need and how to get the best deal on insurance if you need to make some changes.

Mia and Dinah discuss:

• four key types of insurance: Life Insurance, Total & Permanent Disability, Trauma Cover, and Income Protection Insurance
• the importance of knowing how much insurance you have both inside and outside of your superannuation
• the importance of updating your “Binding Nomination” regularly if you hold your Insurance inside your Superannuation policy
• recent changes to legislation which could automatically cancel your insurance within superannuation
• how to estimate how much insurance you need including where to find online calculators
• when you might need to contact a FInancial Advisor for more advice.

LIFE ADMIN HIGH OF THE WEEK

• Dinah talks about the benefits of using Paypal for online shopping to speed up the checkout process.

LIFE ADMIN LOW OF THE WEEK

• Mia talks about how she has received letters relating to her superannuation that she doesn’t understand and the challenges in understanding the complex language
• Dinah talks about how she a shared calendar faux pas. 

RESOURCES

Life Insurance Calculator - Money Smart, Noble Oak

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This episode will help you understand your mobile phone bill and switch plans in under an hour!

This episode talks about the paradox of choice when it comes to choosing from the more than 300 mobile phone plans available.

Mia and Dinah talk about the things you need to consider including:

• Network reliability
• Network coverage 
• Value for money
• Contracts or Pay as You Go
• Phone included or Bring Your Own Device (BYOD)
• Data limits.

Dinah talks about the steps she went through to change plans including:

• Looking at usage information for the past few months to assess what plan she needed
• Assessing what networks she was willing to consider. 
• How she used comparison a site to quickly choose the best plan
• Assessing if getting a new phone as part of a plan was good value for money.

LIFE ADMIN HIGHS OF THE WEEK

• Mia talks about using the secure vault in her Password Manager to fill in Immigration and Customs forms while she was on the plane. 

LIFE ADMIN LOW OF THE WEEK

• Dinah talks about she needed to reinstall her Password Manager on her computer and that it made her realise how much she how relies on it.

POWER TOOL

Trip it - Travel itinerary app

RESOURCES

Open Signal - website providing information about network reliability

Whistle Out - website comparing mobile phone plans

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Prioritise and plan your social life.

This episode talks about some of the things you need to think about when you are organising your social life including:

• the value of social connection
• consciously organsing your social life
• prioritising how to spend your time to nurture your important friendships
• people priority vs event priority
• tools to help make organising your social life less of an admin burden.

Mia talks about the evidence on the value of social connection and research around the number of real friendships.

Dinah talks about the framework she uses to organise her social life with reference lists and her shared calendar at the core.

Mia talks about how to get ideas for what to do and where to go and her strategy to having regular and traditional events to keep her social life on track.

LIFE ADMIN HIGH OF THE WEEK

• Mia talks about using Airtasker to outsource some of her admin.

LIFE ADMIN LOW OF THE WEEK

• Dinah talks about how she organised a group gift and that she is chasing payment from others.

POWER TOOL

Hurry Slowly Podcast - Episode on Errand Paralysis

RESOURCES

Doodle poll - to pick the best choice for a group of people 

Whats App - to setup groups to making organising group events easier

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Decide if you need a credit card and if so, choose the best one for your purchasing and payment habits.

There are over 200 credit cards on offer in Australia, and this episode talks about how you can get the right credit card for you. Things to consider include:

• your spending habits
• your ability to pay off the outstanding balance each month
• your credit score
• the types of credit cards and benefits available.

Mia and Dinah share their top tips including:

• knowing yourself and your spending habits
• considering how much effort it takes to maximise rewards and benefits
• comparing the key features including annual fees, interest rates, sign on and ongoing benefits, and taking into account traps like capped monthly points
• putting reminders in your calendar for the best time to review your credit card arrangements
• calling your bank to see if you can get a better deal to avoid shopping around
• using comparison sites to quickly compare and choose a new credit card that is better than your current one
• setting up a direct debit to pay the statement amount automatically each month.

LIFE ADMIN HIGH OF THE WEEK

• Dinah talks about how her Password Manager made it much simple to find her son’s lost school iPad
• Mia talks about her daughter’s netball coach's website and WhatsApp groups he has set up to organise games and training like a pro.

LIFE ADMIN LOW OF THE WEEK

• Dinah talks about a school app that duplicates content and has a really poor user experience.

POWER TOOL

Dinah talks about the Pineapple Project podcast, an ABC podcast hosted by Claire Hooper and in particular Series 3 - Tidy.

RESOURCES

MoneySmart.gov.au - criteria to help compare and choose

Credit Score - Ways to access your credit score for free

Credit Card Comparison Site - Canstar 

Credit Card Comparisons - Frequent Flyer Rewards - Choice

Podcast - Pineapple Project - Series 3 - Tidy 

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This episode will help you understand why you may need to help others with their life admin and some of the legal and practical considerations you need to consider if you take on that role.

We consider some of the things you need to think about when you need to help someone else with their life admin, including:

• what the signs are or the events that may happen that trigger your need to assist someone with their life admin
• the types of life admin you may need to help with
• how to avoid family conflict and maintain family harmony.

Mia interviews Stephanie Rendell, a lawyer who works in elder care planning and talks about:

• what life admin you can do informally and when you need to put formal documents like Powers of Attorney in place
• things to consider when appointing a third-party financial administrator
• considerations for reimbursement and remuneration in Power of Attorney activities
• record keeping obligations if you take on someone’s Power of Attorney
• services that Elder Care Lawyers can provide including Substitute decision-makers, Caring agreements, Advanced Care Directives, Wills and Elder Care abuse.

Mia and Dinah talk about some of the practical things you can do to make it easier to manage and share the work of taking on someone else’s life admin including:

• Establishing a shared digital calendar for medical and other appointments
• Establishing a shared email address for bills and statements, to create transparency among family members
• Establishing shared password management systems
• Establishing shared To Do Lists to allocate and track tasks
• Setting up roster systems and
• Scheduling monthly teleconferences to discuss the situation and share the activities.

LIFE ADMIN HIGH OF THE WEEK

• Dinah talks about securing her favourite shopping list and meal planners to restore order to her fridge.
• Mia talks about how easy it was to nominate the days she wanted to take as purchased annual leave by using her shared calendar and the relief of having all the childcare over the school holidays for the year sorted.

LIFE ADMIN LOW OF THE WEEK

• Dinah talks about how she has still failed to manage to establish a system for the digital photos from a recent long trip.

POWER TOOL

Podcast - The One You Feed

RESOURCES

Stephanie Rendell, Associate - Head Of Wills And Estates, RNG Lawyers

Episode 1 - Shared Calendars

Episode 2 - Going paperless

Episode 3 - Managing passwords and form filling data

Episode 4 - Mastering To Do Lists

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Deal with the admin generated by and organised for children, which starts as soon as you get pregnant and never seems to end.

This episode talks about how you can address the many admin tasks you need to sort when you have kids, including:

• health 
• daycare, school and school holidays
• social life including birthday parties
• extracurricular activities
• decluttering their stuff - clothes, toys, books, artworks, craft.

Mia and Dinah share their top tips including:

• having a launchpad and visible weekly schedule
• systems to deal with arts & craft and keepsake items
• using a form filling app to make filling forms a breeze
• using WhatsApp groups for school and team communication
• scheduling out the school holidays using your shared calendar
• using apps for sporting team management
• using checklists for birthday party organisation.

LIFE ADMIN HIGH OF THE WEEK

• Dinah talks about a scavenger hunt birthday party she has organised for her daughter which was fun admin
• Mia talks about sorting out her superannuation at work 

LIFE ADMIN LOW OF THE WEEK

• Dinah talks about the challenge of organising visas for an upcoming trip

POWER TOOL

Mia talks about using the iOs shortcuts app to develop automated sequences on her phone and the Files App to scan documents to cloud storage.

RESOURCES

Episode 1 - Shared Calendars

Episode 2 - Going paperless

Episode 3 - Managing passwords and form filling data

Episode 4 - Mastering To Do Lists

Episodes 6,7 & 8 - Decluttering

School Holiday Program - online web directory

Team Stuff  & Team App - sporting team apps

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This episode will help you understand what sort of budget you need, get it done more efficiently and actually stick to it!

This episode talks about the reasons you need a budget, the tools you can use to prepare a budget, and how to monitor your budget once you have set it up.

Mia and Dinah talk about the range of reasons why preparing a budget is important and how it can help you make better decisions about other areas of your life admin. 

Dinah talks about how it is important to understand you past expenditure in order to set a realistic budget going forward. They talk about the various options to easily get this information including trying out tools within internet banking and apps that automatically extract data from your bank accounts.

They explore how you can set-up a budget based on your expected expenditure and your  goals. They also talk about the reality of sticking to a budget and some of the hacks to make it easier to stay on track.

LIFE ADMIN LOW OF THE WEEK

• Mia talks about how she needs to visit her bank to sort out access to one online banking for one of her bank accounts.

LIFE ADMIN HIGH OF THE WEEK

• Dinah talks about how she has created a spreadsheet of Christmas presents and already bought most of them using online shopping.

RESOURCES

Pocketbook - budgeting app

Money Brilliant - budget app that also recommends product changes

The Barefoot Investor - popular money guide

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