Self-Reminders 5 years in the future

raintyger

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How can someone remind themselves to do something 5 years into the future?

I've bought an appliance. The salesperson says their extended warranty plan is fully refundable if there have been no claims after the warranty expires. The big obstacles I see are 1.) actually remembering and 2.) remembering in time to claim the refund - you have 30 days after the warranty expires.

I've actually tried to send myself e-mail reminders at work, but 5 years is a long time to keep a reminder active. The reminder I tried to send to myself must've gotten deleted with changes to the server or some other server crash. I have a free e-mail reminder service, but still it is prone to perhaps the business failing after 5 years or even my e-mail changing.

So if someone else out there has a good idea on how to get a reminder to yourself RELIABLY 5 years from now, I'd like to hear it! The best I can figure so far is to set an e-mail reminder to myself 6 months into the future and then keep sending it via whatever methods are still available at the time.
 

betsygee

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How about an old-fashioned tickler system? http://www.lifehack.org/articles/productivity/back-to-basics-the-tickler-file.html 

We used this system when I was a legal secretary (many moons ago...)  
   Instead of doing a file for each day of the month, you could make one for each month of the year, or one for each coming  year.  You just have to remember to pull the file like clockwork every day, or month, or year....whatever time increment you decide on.
 

MoochNNoodles

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My husband put everything in Outlook.  He's been able to transfer things as we've changed computers over the years.  I would think smartphones can do that also?  I'm new to that world still.
 
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raintyger

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Thanks for everyone's suggestions. I might go with setting reminders not so far in the future and then forwarding them 6 mos. to one year at time to make sure the reminder system is still operating. But I might also do physical reminders the same way. I buy a calendar that has pockets for each month, I guess it is sort of a tickler system, but not so detailed. I could just put a card in that says "Collect warranty insurance premium Nov. 2019" and move it forward when necessary.
 
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