Posted by The other day, I noticed that I have accumulated a mountain pile of utility bills and receipts that I needed to take care of. The bills were paid, otherwise they will cut off our electricity and water, I just need to file them away. But my storage box was already bursting at the seams which means I have to get rid of some outdated paper files I have been holding on for too long. Getting a bigger storage box was not an option.
After going through my folders, I threw away old bank statements, utility bills from several years back, billing statements from credit card that I don’t carry anymore, and even mortgage statements that I have already closed years ago. I even found a citation for a traffic violation that was settled almost a decade ago. Why do I even hold on to these “trash?”
According to Suze Orman, an author and a prominent financial adviser, we only need to keep the utility bills, bank statements, and credit card receipts for a year. Though income tax returns, medical bills, and records of selling a house, may need to be kept for at least 3 years as specified by her. I definitely hold on to these longer than that. In fact I even have my tax return from 20 years ago!
Better yet, maybe I should transition to paperless statements and do it all electronically. Most companies now provide digital records anyway. This definitely will be less clutter, plus we will save trees. In a study a few years ago, it estimated that if all U.S. households switched to paperless billing, 16.5 million trees would be saved annually. Should we get rid of toilet paper too?! I have nothing against saving trees, I am just old school who like to smell the paper.
Because the documents I was throwing away contain personal and sensitive information, I needed to shred them. As I was shredding the mound of papers and producing enough material for my own ticker tape parade, suddenly my old shredding machine quit on me. After a few tries of turning it off and on, it would not come back to life. Perhaps it was protesting that it was already overworked.
I have a remaining stack of paper to shred that I just can’t throw away. It was already trash and I cannot get rid of it still! (See photo below.)
Unfortunately we humans also hold on to some outdated things that we should have been shredding and letting go. Guilt, doubts, anxieties, grudges, and regrets from past mistakes are the things I am talking about. We should not store them electronically either.
I wish shredding machines for those negative feelings are available at Home Depot or Office Depot.
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Post Note:
I was able to finish shredding my discarded files as the shredding machine came alive after 10 minutes. It only overheated, and I don’t need to buy a new machine.