My story
My mother ran our whole world. My father's business, her own (she was a Pilates instructor), my schooling, our taxes, every bill, policy, and password. When I was 17, she was diagnosed with stage 4 colon cancer. She passed away a month before my 18th birthday.
Along with everything else we lost, we lost the map.
I started adult life with a fresh driver's license in my wallet, and that was it. Did you know you need two forms of ID to use most government services? I only avoided becoming one of the thousands of Americans who are effectively undocumented in their own country because of the kindness of one Social Security employee, who gave me a new card.
My dad and I spent the next two years rebuilding our lives from scratch, one document at a time. I was so scared of ever going through that again that I became very, very organized, or as organized as I could manage. At 24 I put together my emergency binder, and everyone I love was informed: if Kate ever gets hit by a bus, everything you need is in there. My friends still call it the "Hit by a Bus" binder.
Then life got busy, and keeping it current got hard. The binder slipped quietly out of date. An out-of-date binder is no binder at all. I went looking for something digital that would hold our records and keep me accountable. No product arrived. Everything on the market wanted to keep my family's most sensitive documents in someone else's cloud, held hostage behind a monthly paywall.
Then my spouse, a software engineer, pointed out that with today's tools I could probably learn to build it myself. I love a challenge. So here we are.