This morning I decided today would be the day that I would tackle the paper cluttering up my coffee table. I even took a before photo:
To start the task I decided to pay bills, decide what to do about some charitable contribution requests, and respond to pending mail. I didn't have too many bill, so that part wasn't so bad. Ditto for the charitable requests. But when it came around to dealing with pending mail . . . well, that was a different story.
I first tackled the items that required phone calls:
- Scheduled HVAC Fall Maintenance
- Called the Tree Service
- Called a Doctor's Office Regarding Invoice vs. EOB Statement (and saved myself a hefty sum!)
Then it came time to address my COBRA election forms. I had the option to continue both my health insurance and the flexible spending account. Naturally, the packet of information did not adequately tell me everything I needed to know. I tried to find the information on both the COBRA administrator's website and the FSA administrator's website to no avail. Next came a series of telephone calls to both organizations. After what seemed to be a very long afternoon I finally had the information I needed to make the COBRA election - which I did online - and then wrote a check with a letter for mailing my first premium payment.
At that point I had my FSA account on my mind and decided to complete my final FSA claim form to request reimbursement for the balance I had paid in for the year. I gathered all of the information, completed the forms, and printed everything out. The forms can be submitted by snail mail, fax, or email. I don't have a fax, so I decided to go for the email route as it's easier to track the progress than snail mail. I have a printer that also scans but for a reason named Vista my computer can only communicate with the printer, not the scanner. No problem! I have a flash drive that I scanned the claim forms onto and then transferred them to my computer.
When it came time to send the email submitting the FSA claim forms I discovered that the scanned files were in .jpg format. And very large .jpg files at that. Now I'd done well to get to that point and could not figure out how to scan in a format other than .jpg nor how to convert the files to .pdf or some other more normal format for documents. I tried a few different ways and finally sent one email with each page as an individual .jpg file and a second email with a compressed zip folder of the .jpg files. I hope they are able to download, view, and print the claim form and attachments. I worked hard on this crazy contraption!
Anyway, I finally gave up on this paper project at about 10:00 p.m. and quickly typed up this post. I am pleased to say that I accomplished several tasks that needed to be completed. But I am very frustrated to tell you that my coffee table looks exactly like it did when I began this morning. Sigh..... Oh well, tomorrow is another day - hopefully a much more productive day. Or at least a day where I can visually see the progress from my efforts!
So, <yawn!> what's for dinner? zzzzzzz.
