<p>We use any old paper and junk mail, etc. under our kindling.</p>
<p>BUT, be judicious in the fire fodder faze (couldn’t resist)…the first year I did that I had an inferno. Needed a blizzard to cool things down. Too much at once. Lots of ash to clean up
too! Had my own volcano.</p>
<p>Still working on that cat litter idea…</p>
<p>We use one of those accordion-type files with monthly dividers. All bills and receipts get stashed in the proper divider. At tax time everything we might need is sorted and the rest shredded. Important papers go into a big manilla envelope for the year ( for example home improvements, medical insurance statements). Tax proofs go into a manilla envelope with the rest of the tax documentation and 1040 printouts. I suppose I should shred the slim envelopes from our early years together but they dont take much room.
The rest gets shredded when taxes are done.<br>
My problem is DH shreds “unimportant” receipts weekly. And then I decide to return something and go hunting for the sales slip.</p>
<p>That’s why run of the mill receipts go into a separate basket. Christmas/returnable receipts have an envelope with the year on it…</p>
<p>Oh man! Timely question. One of my New Years resolutions was to get the paper monster in the office under control, and I have made some headway. It is a constant battle though!</p>
<p>One thing I found helpful was a chart I found online which tells how long things should be kept (google " personal record retention"). I printed it out and stuck it on the side of the file cabinet. Also helpful has been the decision to bite the bullet and invest in a better shredder.</p>
<p>Part of my storage is devoted to the instructions and manuals that come with everything, from the refrigerator to the electric toothbrush. Once in a while I go through and toss the manuals for things we don’t have anymore. I’m also getting rid of manuals for smaller-value items which, if they broke, I know we’d just replace. Do I really need to still have the instructions that came with the bathroom scale I bought 10 years ago?</p>
<p>One category that’s taking more and more space is medical receipts. I keep those not so much for the receipt, but for a record of our health adventures. But I’m thinking that I might just keep the last few years, and start a medical-history spreadsheet instead.</p>
<p>vballmom, thank you for that catalog-unsubscription link. Not for me so much, but for my elderly mother. She gets tons of those, and spends too much money on things she didn’t know existed, but now can’t live without.</p>
<p>Might I suggest one of these? <a href=“http://i22.ebayimg.com/07/i/001/05/22/0216_35.JPG[/url]”>http://i22.ebayimg.com/07/i/001/05/22/0216_35.JPG</a></p>
![http://i22.ebayimg.com/07/i/001/05/22/0216_35.JPG[/url]](http://i22.ebayimg.com/07/i/001/05/22/0216_35.JPG%5B/url%5D){kind=link}
<p>We lived overseas for few years before we moved back this past June. Before we left, I changed everything to paperless. Where we lived, it would take up to a month to get any mail to us, so unless it was absolutely necessary we didn’t receive any mail. Now that we are back, we are still very streamlined. We do not get any catalogues or junk mail. I pay everything online. I don’t keep that many bills for taxes because we don’t get that many deductions, and we have one brokerage acct, which we get the yearend statement online. I scan all statements to be uploaded to our accountant’s website. I also file health claims online and they reimburse me via wire transfer. We are truly paperless. I got mad at H because he ordered NY Time (paper) again.</p>
<p>Great tips! My goal is to quit accumulating. I might even have H talked into the value of paperless billing</p>
<p>Question for you all. How you choose whether something is “shred worthy” or “trash/recycle worthy”? </p>
<p>CC bill=shred.<br>
Bank Statement=shred.<br>
Electric bill=??<br>
Department Store cc statement=??
etc…</p>
<p>Why do people feel the need to shred bank statement? What’s on there that people could steal? It has your name and address, your acct number (probably masked), no birthdate, no SS #. If someone were to read you bank statement, they may know how much money you have, but that’s about it. They wouldn’t be able to take any money out, change your ID/PW. Same with all other bills. Am I missing something?</p>
<p>
Au contraire Pierre…Wells Fargo statements do not mask the account number and coupled with name, address and name of bank, it would only take a little bit more info like SS# or DOB ( both of which can be easily obtained to a hacker) to cause some real damage to you account or your credit. why give anyone the opportunity to have any more information than you have to do so?</p>
<p>The key is SS# or DOB, isn’t it? How would they get that? I am in the information business. We do not store SS# or DOB on anything. When you write someone a check, it has your name, address and your account number. So what makes a bank statement different?</p>
<p>If you’re a registered voter in Florida, and other states, it’s available online. Using Radaris and other datamining services it’s available with a little effort. Think of all the times people have registered for an Internet site and they ask for a DOB to determine if you’re over age 18. I never give the correct one, changing the month, day and year by a digit in different directions and have for years. Even if you are diligent, think of all the recent breaches by banks and credit cards that exposed your information. With the Patriot Act, you have to give both DOB and SS# to the banks and financial institutions. You give your SS# to your doctor as many (TOO many) insurance companies use your SS# as an identifier instead of an alternate number.
My point was simply why increase the odds of something bad happening by NOT shredding bank statements or any other document with information
As for the check vs statement, the check doesn’t list your savings account number ( which a statement would as Wells Fargo’s unified statements do) nor does it list the amount of money in the account which could tell a hacker how much he could withdraw undetected…</p>
<p>Justamom…a big help here…DH gets his magazines on his Nook. He also knows that he can find past articles (like he has EVER done that) by searching online.</p>
<p>Now if I can just convince him to get rid of the roughly 1000 science fiction paperbacks we have! At least they don’t need to be shredded.</p>
<p>I am just saying that some people may think they are being diligent trying to protect themselves, but they are really not doing anything by shredding their bank statements. All they are doing is making sure their neighbors do not accidentally come upon their statements and find out how much they are worth. We are giving out our name, address, phone number, and account number every time we write a check.</p>
<p>We have Wells Fargo and they only show the last few numbers of our accounts on the statements. We get them online so that might be different then if they mail them out.</p>
<p>My issue is I don’t have a good “office” space in this house. We have a desk in the kitchen but it becomes a dumping ground for everything. I had an actual office in our old house with a nice desk and filing space for stuff. I’m currently looking for a desk for our family room that has doors that can hide all the crap :D.</p>
<p>SteveMA, you will keep less junk of you have less places to put it. We have a small desk in our kitchen…just enough space for the household junk. I would NEVER buy more storage space for “stuff”.</p>
<p>For those going on line - remember to have some place someone could find all the acounts and passwords. DH looked over my shouder one day and said he would never know about a bunch of this stuff if anything happened to me. Bills come to my email address so he could check that but he was not sure about all of the accounts. </p>
<p>I also had a dustup with one strore credit account because their email notices went into a spam filter at the server level, they had the wrong phone number, and they were ready to dun. Over a very small charge. Now I make sure all is working on paper before I go paperless. </p>
<p>But I sympathize. I just did the massive sort from my office to get ready for taxes. Piles are on the floor right now and I will go through them today for toss, shred or keep. Then I will go back to 3 years ago and shred or toss paper not related to long tern capital improvements. It’s a once a year process.</p>
<p>We have a lot of storage space but I’d like to clear a lot of the old stuff out anyways. I have a new pile to clear this weekend but I think it will be easy.</p>
<p>Btw, Evernote was compromised this week and I’m trying to decide on whether to keep using them. It is a very convenient service that I use for web scraps. I wouldn’t put anything important on it though.</p>
<p>I’m considering Microsoft office web as a replacement. The advantage of Evernote is mobile access.</p>
<p>Similar to the question about why shred your bank statements after some period of time (which I do because it has our account number on it and somehow just feels like we’re exposed) but why do people save bank statements or credit card statements? </p>
<p>I shred them after reviewing/paying them because all the information is available online. I keep very few papers…I create a new file folder each January for that year’s tax papers and recycle or shred just about everything else. </p>
<p>My big pile comes up with the ‘to do’ paper pile…coupon for carpet cleaning that I need to schedule and then have the coupon that day, an auto policy statement–after payment–and I need to call to make sure D’s discount for good grades was applied, mailing from D’s college with details about parents week-end, article from a magazine with a decorating idea I might implement or a cleaning solution/beauty product that I want to try.</p>