Possible Personal Finance Actions

You should minimize your use of credit/Debt Financing. Esp non-Mortgage.

Your Mortgage debt should be Fixed Rate.

If you have assets and dependents, you should have a will. NoLo has a nice WebApp-based service for $70, or a Cd-Rom with Word Processing files for customizing, for $25. (Jihi and I used their software in 1999 for our first wills, having had Number One Son in 1998.)

Anyone in the household, having an income on which other people are dependent, should have Life Insurance. (Children, being net-expenses, should not be insured, regardless of what the scamsters of Gerber tell you.)

It might make sense for a wealthy retired parent to have an irrevocable Life Insurance Trust as a way of working around the Estate Tax.
If you have net assets (Real Estate net of mortgage plus Life Insurance, etc.) sufficient to trigger the Estate Tax, you probably want an irrevocable Life Insurance trust.

In case you and your spouse die together: you should have a financial custodian/trustee who's different from the guardian who will raise the children.

you also want to name a back-up person for each role, in case the primary person dies or is unable to serve
if the guardian lives far away, you may want to name a temporary guardian who's near-by. (Are the kids going to move in the middle of a school term?)

Pay down Credit Card-s; change credit cards

Pay down Student Loans

Buy Life Insurance, Homeowners Insurance, etc

Pay into 401k, IRA