HEIDI ROED | Business Owner
A Caregiver For Life
Originally from the Detroit metro area of Michigan, Heidi has lived in Charlotte over 20 years. Her mother’s family hails from the Mississippi Delta and Nebraska. Her father’s family emigrated to the US from Sandefjord, Norway after World War II. Her father, Finn, was a high school English and American Literature teacher. Finn passed away due to complications from a simultaneous stroke and heart attack in 2019. Her mother, Georgia, was an elementary education music teacher who struggled with major depressive disorder, general anxiety panic disorder and what appeared to be hoarding disorder. Georgia would experience a nervous breakdown when Heidi was just 12 years old. It was at this age that Heidi would begin her journey as a lifelong caregiver to her parents and they would become the inspiration behind Life Easier LLC.
How Life Easier Began
Heidi earned her bachelor’s degree from Michigan State University and a master’s in business administration from Wake Forest University. After spending 20 years in Corporate America as a trouble shooter in a variety of industries including Manufacturing, Retail and Trash/Recycling and shuttling home to Michigan from North Carolina to help her folks, a health scare caused Heidi to re-evaluate her non-stop life. With encouragement from her then husband and her parents, Heidi started Life Easier LLC in 2018 with the intent of helping people just like her parents age in place as independently and as safely as possible while creating a more healthy and sustainable life for herself. Life Easier first began as a senior move management, decluttering, and organizing business primarily assisting seniors to break the cycle of hoarding in order to find happier downsized lives in more senior friendly living arrangements i.e. a senior community, a daughter/son’s home, or an apartment.
How Life Easier Evolved
In 2020 when a decluttering client, Linda, became frustrated with her accountant she turned to Heidi for help. The accountant had advised Linda that she owed $40,000 to the IRS. How could that be? At the time, Heidi had helping her mother, now battling ovarian cancer in Michigan, with her financial paperwork. Heidi offered to help Linda. Since Covid had begun to rage throughout the country, Linda put 4 disorganized boxes of paperwork on her porch. Peeking out from a crack in the door, Linda commanded, as Heidi picked up the large boxes and put them in her car, “Please organize my paperwork and find my $40,000!” After three hours of sorting, Heidi had found the problem. Heidi fired the accountant and hired a replacement. Linda’s taxes were corrected and, for the next two years, Heidi would be Linda’s financial and information security assistant until such time Linda’s family needed to take over her finances. By early 2024, two of Heidi’s clients encouraged her to stop decluttering houses and instead work full time in the financial and information security space. Georgia passed away in August of 2024. After several weeks of cleaning out her mother’s home – the last hoarded house she would ever clean out, Heidi pivoted her business to handle financial, administrative and information security needs for senior clients full time.
When she is not working alongside her clients, Heidi spends her downtime reading, gardening, hiking and cooking with her boyfriend and her always hungry cat Fritz in the mountains of western North Carolina.
