Non-Notorious Notarial Notification

You'd think that the topic of declaring yourself as a notary would be pretty uneventful. 

That is until you say so in front of a coworker. 

As it turns out, there is always someone within earshot who needs something notarized. There are the obvious ones—wills, trusts, powers of attorney, divorce agreements, and so on. 

And it only takes one coworker to overhear that tidbit before you find yourself carrying your completely unofficial but absolutely on-point notarial satchel into the office more than just a few times per year to help rubber stamp some signatures so that someone can get an official copy of their newborn's birth certificate or so that they can consolidate an old retirement account down into one. 

But why? What in the world is so necessary about this rubber stamp and why is it a thing? 

In short, it's just one small way that a government can tamp down on fraudulent documents.

Need to send an important document in the mail? Okay, nice! Just have someone else sign it too, but someone sort of unbiased. 

The short explanation is about as much as you need to know to never think about this again, but if you read even that far, you might also be the kind of person who would keep reading past here anyway. Let's not lie to ourselves. Keep reading, you curious, curious, rascal.

By having some other citizen (who is "pre-verified" by the government to do so) co-sign the document, there is some increased amount of trust for the recipient of that document to know that the person signing the paper is likely the real deal.

There's an entire distributed workforce of notaries spread across the state, and they're oftentimes already working where you'd come across the need for a notary anyway. Working on a home mortgage? Your mortgage person is almost certainly a notary—they've seen some paperwork in their day, and if they aren't personally a notary, they almost definitely have one working in their office. 

But that's the cool part—if you will. Just about anyone can be a notary, and you can even charge a few bucks (check your local laws) for each document you need to notarize. Or if you're like me, you're grimacing at the idea of having to track that income for tax purposes, and you just write it off as a good conversation starter and avoid thinking about the $120 fee it takes to get registered in your state every 5 years...