Organizing Old Documents: Find Out How Long You Really Need It
We all have paper we need to save for various reasons, but most of us end up hanging onto it much longer than we should. Find out from your tax preparer, financial advisor, and lawyer what documents you need to keep and for how long.
Since doing this is part of your organization plan. Weigh the cost in storage space and time required to hold onto these documents against the costs involved in recreating them in the event you might need them in the future. What is the likelihood? How difficult would it be to obtain them again?
Make sure to purge your files regularly (every three to six months), using the guidelines your
professional advisors give you. Write on the hanging folder (or attach a note) to remind you.
It’s easy to forget and just allow these mounds of paper to accumulate. If you keep going through them regularly, replacing the oldest year’s with the newest, you’ll still only need the same amount of storage. That means that once you set up storage systems for these long-term records, you’ll probably never have to add to them.
Tags:organization, storage
