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Organizing important papers?

666 views 8 replies 8 participants last post by  oneKnight 
#1 ·
Sorry if this has been covered recently, I looked back a little bit and didn't notice anything . . .

I am having trouble keeping track of all of my important papers. Anything from bills to insurance papers to important kids records to manuals, you get the idea. Right now I basically let them pile up on the kitchen table before they all get shoved in one big drawer. Anything I need I just dig through that drawer. I hardly ever lose anything, but it's also a pain (and the drawer is getting pretty full!
)

Any advice?
 
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#2 ·
We have a file cabinet that we use. We have "sections" in the top drawer:

Bills
Insurance
Investments
Military
Etc.

Then, we just have file folders for various things in each section. The rest of the file cabinet is mostly storage or school files (for me). The cabinet also locks. Hard to replace papers go in the fire-proof safe.
 
#3 ·
Get yourself a small filing cabinet and just start labeling what you have. If its not that important shread it. Another good thing is when you get your mail,open it right then and there.Even if you can't get to it right away,put it on top of your cabinet in one of those plastic in/out boxes,but try to file them that week.
 
#4 ·
I open my mail by the garbage; some is toss, some is shred (goes in the shred box), some is file. I have a two drawer file cabinet from Walmart.
 
#5 ·
Quote:

Originally Posted by chanibell View Post
Get yourself a small filing cabinet and just start labeling what you have. If its not that important shread it. Another good thing is when you get your mail,open it right then and there.Even if you can't get to it right away,put it on top of your cabinet in one of those plastic in/out boxes,but try to file them that week.
go through mail right away...throw away the junk!
 
#6 ·
I used to have a two-drawer filing cabinet for all of our papers. But someone once told me there is absoluetly no reason to have more than a small filing box worth of papers if you are not a business owner. So I took the challenge so i could free up that space. I bought a small plastic file box. Almost half of it is taken up by past seven year's worth of taxes and our mortgage papers. I only keep about one year worth of bills, insurance papers, investment info, credit card statments, bank statements, etc...... At this point, I can get ALL of my backed info online so there is really no reason to keep more than one year. I only keep the one year in case something happens to those electronic files and I need to prove recent activity. I keep all proof of car repairs until we get rid of that car. Same with medical records of pets. There is a bunch of miscelaneous stuff like car titles, birth records, seldom used cards, important reciepts, etc.... All is sorted into appropriate files that are labelled. At tax time, I sort and purge anything over a year old. This year, I will also be taking any taxes from 7+ years ago, scanning them, saving on a disk, and tossing the hard copies. I did the same with the important parts of previous mortgage papers. I agree with sorting mail by the garbage. I am too lazy to file away every item as it comes in, so I neatly stack things on top of the box (which is in a cabinet out of sight) until the pile is big enough to warrent filing it all away.
 
#7 ·
Thank you all so much for the suggestions! Sounds like I need to get myself one of those cabinets (now, where to put it?!?!
). I do fairly good at recycling all the junk right away, it just turns out that SOOOO much of it I actually need (at least temporarily) so that's where the problem comes in!
 
#8 ·
We also just use one file box and at the end of the year we go through and toss a lot and organize what we need to keep like tax stuff. Then the stuff we keep goes into one of two cereal boxes that we have. When those get full I figure I'll go through those and do the same. The cereal boxes are on the top shelf in the closet, the file box is on the floor in the closet.

Good luck organizing!!!!
 
#9 ·
I have a 3" 3-ring Binder, everything gets holes punched and goes into the binder. Small receipts usually get stapled to a larger piece of the bill or just plain paper and subject dividers keep things separated (house/utilities, credit, checking account, car/insurance, school/loan, taxes, misc). I keep EVERYTHING about money in there, it has saved us a LOT of headaches.
And it fits in the bookshelf!
 
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