How do you manage your household paperwork?

Chappers27

Hey all.

I was wondering how most people managed their paperwork. I have a filing cabinet, with old agreements, sorted into categories. I have a pile of opened letters on my computer desk and I have a pile of opened letters in the kitchen. I keep telling myself one day to sort it out, but I never get round to that fateful day.

How do YOU do it?

EssexExile

The important stuff goes in the filing cabinet, the rest goes in the recycling.

anto164

Important stuff mailed decanted from envelopes into a layflat folder into groups in the relevance. Each year i do a sort out and bin all old paperwork. The other year, i found i had stored 8 years worth of payslips - They all went into the bin.

I've tried to go paperless with nearly everything, so important emails go into a folder on my email account.

Everything else in the bin.

Mnd

Same as you..One Day!

Missus_Hyde

We have file boxes with paper work in them, which periodically I go through and chuck out anything which is obsolete.

The obsolete papers are then shredded to within an inch of their life and put in the rubbish bin.

binaryuniverse

I have file boxes and plastic wallets with 6+ years of paperwork in them. I'm thinking of scanning the whole lot, and just keeping paper copies for up to a year, in the future. Will save on a fair bit of space.

PasturesNew

If you want to "start right now" then get it all out and just pull out the pure rubbish and the really important bits. Bin the rubbish and put the really important bits into one folder.

For all the rest, you can sort it into year piles if you wish, then stack the year piles on top of each other - then get some big C4 envelopes and slide the whole packs into the envelopes in year packs - all years if they'll fit, or 1-3 years in an envelope .... however it fits.

Write the years on the front of the envelopes in big numbers and the word "Household Bills".

Now shove those somewhere and completely forget them.

Then you can mentally "let go" and start to take any new system forward, knowing that in those sealed envelopes are anything that one day you might wish to look for....

In 6-10 years' time you will be able to safety shred each one if you wish.

chelseablue

All my accounts are paperless now so don't get too much sent to the house anymore.

I have a metal filing box where I keep stuff like birth certificates and pension paperwork.

I always keep 6 months payslips in case I get asked for them when I re-mortgage.

Anything that comes in the post that I don't need to keep I take it into work with me and put it through the shredder (don't have one at home)

sausage_time

I have a filing cabinet with one pocket per institution/category (one each financial house, one for legal, one for HMRC, one for the cats, one for car stuff, etc) where I keep the important stuff (agreements mainly, most statements are on-line). For HMRC I have a cardboard wallet per financial year and put all the stuff relevant for that tax return there. I scrub it out once a year or so, and like others shred anything remotely sensitive.

Uxb

binaryuniverse wrote: »

I'm thinking of scanning the whole lot, and just keeping paper copies for up to a year, in the future. Will save on a fair bit of space.

Check out Fujitsu IX500 fast A4 document scanner - does both sides of the page at the same time and runs at around 30 seconds per sheet.
Chuck 30 sheets in the feed in tray and 1 minute later they are done as pdf's. You need to set it up properly, go though each of the options decide what you want (eg flat pdf or searchable pdfs is one choice to make) and read the manual as its a semi-pro piece of kit rather than consumer grade.
I'd done around 20000 sheets so far on mine and it is rated for 200,000 plus sheets - at which point you need to change the rollers.

If you go down this road of 100% paperless remember you need a proper bullet-proof backup strategy, copies kept elsewhere plus probably secure 'read only' directories, multiple mirrored copies and additionally every year I do total copy onto DVD's which are kept forever...which guards against anything being accidentally overwritten and then copied into the backups un-noticed.

NotRichAtAll

do you all scan wage slips?
i keep thinking of doing this myself, but am curious once you have scanned your important documents. do you shred the paper originals? are scanned documents accepted if needed?