These were primarily medical records, documents printed on oversize paper, some financial records to which I did not have online access, and documents related to real estate and auto purchases (which are often passed on in hard copy to the next owner). I offloaded these types of documents to a storage box that could safely gather dust in the garage unless a true emergency arose.Ī second round through the “keepers” left me with just over ten pounds of paperwork to deal with. But none of this needed to fill up a drawer. Were my taxes from 2006 something I would ever want to check again? Or would keeping this file for another year until the mandatory “seven-year rule” expired be enough? I also had a large number of legal records that I knew I should retain-considering all their official stamps, seals, and signatures-and which I’ve had to produce in tangible form in the past. What remained was paperwork that could be scanned, but I questioned whether the effort would be worth it. Judicious pruning of everything got my total paper load down to about 30 pounds after just one round of sifting through files. The towers of folders soon shrank down to two tidy piles. The bottom line: I wouldn’t need to save this stuff- nor would I need to scan it for posterity. I knew that anything I was likely to need now I could access online on demand, and if I did need something, it would be within 12 months, for tax purposes. Most banks and financial institutions save statements for at least a year, and sometimes they hold on to them for up to seven. What’s more, many of the “important” items-including bank statements and utility bills-were now available online, making paper copies (and even scans) of them redundant. ![]() It amazed me how much of this stuff was utter trash. Many pounds’ worth of product manuals, including one for my long-gone VCR.(Why do these always have to be a minimum of five pages long?) Endless files full of statements from banks and investment firms.(While it was sad to toss this stuff out, it amounted to nearly ten pounds of ripped-out magazine pages.) Story clips and tear sheets for pieces I wrote dating back to 1995. ![]() A nondisclosure agreement, expired in June 1991, to review a Toshiba Libretto laptop.FedEx shipping receipts from more than eight years ago.Writers agreements I signed in the 1990s. ![]()
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