I need your advice and direction, friends. I’m trying to get our paperwork organized.
I saw a nice little file box over at Emily’s and she said she picked it up at Office Max. So, off to Office Max I went. I found a file box for only $8.00. It’s nothing fancy but it serves a purpose and fits right on the desk.
(Sadly, this is about as neat as things get in the office. It’s a working space, right?)
Now, I just need to file things. Right now, our paperwork is haphazardly in a binder. I want to separate it into files so we can file things right away on our desk instead of accumulating piles.
I started a list (thanks to Melissa and her recent post) and here’s what I have so far:
Employment
School
Insurance
Gas & Electric
Taxes
401K
Banking
Investments
Pets
Home
Appliances
Electronics
Other Purchases
What am I missing? How do you organize your files? Do you know any resources that I should check out?
Those are the general categories that I have, too. I keep my electronics stuff separate though because those manuals take up lots of space.
Let’s see….::grabs the household binder::
my topics that you are missing are:
HEALTHCARE
AUTO
TRAVEL (gotta plan the vacas!)
I really need to blog my brain, um I mean binder. It keeps me sane and I <3 it!
I think you got them all! My taxes are all in folders by year. I have a folder for our Mortgage and a separate folder labeled ‘City’ that contains our property tax bills (with receipts that are also in the Taxes folders), property assessments, water bills, and any other correspondence from the city. I also have a ‘Social Security’ folder where I put SS statements, credit reports, our SS cards. By the way, THANKS for the good karma painting my friend’s kitchen! We need it badly! ha
Seems like you have a great start. I have a file labeled “to be filed” for the stuff that I don’t need to get around to right away but don’t want to lose.
For receipts I use a small accordian style holder with labels for each month. As receipts come in they get filed under the month and at the end of the month I go through them to keep only the ones I need. At the end of the year the whole thing get filed away under a year folder along with taxes.
no advice here, but “as neat as things get”?? Umm, that looks pretty darn neat to me. You should see my desk. Even when things are put ‘away’ its still looks ridiculous. Lesson learned: never buy a desk with open cubbies, always have drawers to hide the junk!
Car folder – unless you keep it in your car. But even then the original paperwork and stuff has a file folder in our office.
We have an entirely different file box for receipts, but then again we are self employeed.
One thing that we did that made tax time a cinch was to have a folder for just household expenses that we could write off, that way i wasn’t digging through my general home folder each year.
Oh, a folder for Cars! We don’t store our repair receipts and oil change info in our glove compartment box, so we have a single folder that we sort those items in by car.
i think a lot of it just depends on what works best for you. for me, i have my school stuff in a separate box, receipts & ppw from large purchases in a binder and then in our 2 drawer filing cabinet i put all ppw in separated folders (bank info, insurance, bills, taxes, work-related stuff, etc) i do have a couple of “random” folders, just to keep it all together 🙂
before we moved to guam i scanned about 8 inches worth of ppw (just think about how thin paper is and then imagine 8 inches of it!). afterall, i dont need old bills & statements or past leases but i didnt want to just toss them nor did i want to move them across the ocean..so i scanned it all in (using a document feeder) so i could get rid of unnecessary ppw! i’ll be doing that every year from now on! obviously there are some things you have to keep but others – if i need them, i’ll just print it out!