Shred!

I had meant for today’s blog post to be about short sales, as my mother is currently going through one. But that’s a kind of long and somewhat complicated post, and I just did not have time to write it today. So instead, you are getting this reminder to do regular shredding of your financial documents.

This picture has nothing to do with this post. But it is what is right outside my front door.

Avoid Identity Theft- Shred Your Documents

In cleaning and organizing, we are going through all the random paper we have kept over the years. This includes pay stubs from ten years ago. I even found our pay stubs from the pay period we got married. (All I can say is- glad we don’t make that little anymore.)

I have decided that while it’s not a bad idea to keep the documentation from buying our current house, we do not need to hold on to all the paperwork from buying the first house, which we sold over seven years ago. We are keeping our tax documents from 2003 on, but the 2001 and 2002 documents are now gone.

We are also shredding a number of my MIL’s documents.

The flowering bush at the corner of my yard.

But More Than Once a Decade

Here’s the thing about a once a decade shred- there is so much paper that you run out of room in your recycling bin. We have an absolutely giant recycling bin, but it is combined recycling- so everything goes in it, and it’s picked up every other week. We actually burned a couple full containers’ worth of shredded paper because we had nowhere to put it and we still had more shredding to do.

Also, even with a shredder that is designed to shut itself off if it gets too hot, you run the risk of overheating the machine and breaking it. You do this, because you do not realize you have over heated the machine, you think it’s just being fussy, or perhaps has a jam and keep trying to force things through. (Or, at least, that’s what I did.)

Then you have to go out and buy yourself another machine, and because you do not realize you were the problem, you buy yourself a bigger, better, hardier machine- which is nice, but even more expensive.

The wild rose bush at the back corner of my house

Have a Plan

So here’s my advice: Shred junk mail/credit card offers, etc as soon as they come in, or no less often than once a week. Then do a big shred of old documents- like tax returns –every year, say around the time you are filing away this year’s taxes. It will save you clutter, time, and probably money, too.

These bushes grow like weeds around here. Have I mentioned I love living somewhere pretty?