So yesterday among the several little sh!t-fits I had after the coffee poured into an open file drawer was one of my recurring frenzies over the SHEER QUANTITY of paper stashed in file drawers in my office and garage.
Dayum, how I hate all this PAPER! So I started shuffling through it looking for things I could throw out.
Tossed out a ton of records of the endless engagement with the insufferable La Morona, the secretary at GDU whose ouster took almost two years. Threw out a bunch of student evals and annual reviews from my teaching days at GDU, dating back now something like eight or ten years. And that emptied…about a third of one jam-packed drawer.
Another crammed drawer has bank statements dating back to before the invention of electricity. Of course every statement has an account number on it, some defunct, some…not. There may also be papers in there bearing my Social Security number. All those pounds and pounds of paper will have to be shredded or burned.
My shredder is too small to rip up that much paper, so unless I want to track down one of those community shred-a-thons, I’ll have to spend an evening cremating fistful after fistful after fistful of defunct paperwork in the fireplace.
In the middle of all this, what should I find but the receipt for the expensive Chinese wool rug I lent to SDXB and that, last month, he ended up donating to charity in my name.
“Expensive” is what that thing was: I paid over three grand for it at a discount. From deep in an old file of warrantees and paperwork for stuff most of which broke or was discarded years ago, up pops a document showing this rug’s freaking registration number plus its valuation: $4,000.
Holy mackerel. Is this or is this not a gigantic 2012 tax deduction?
Will this or will this not cause the IRS to audit my 2012 returns? But…I have the actual evidence to justify deducting a $4,000 charitable contribution!
Shoot. I should have photographed the thing before we decided to unload it. The truth is, it was in excellent condition: after Anna the Ger-shep came on the scene, I rolled it up and put it out of harm’s way. As a result, it’s been out of the reach of dog teeth, dog claws, and dog rear ends for most of its existence, except for a few years on a little-used floor casa SDXB.
This is not the first time I’ve been surprised and cheered to find a document that any sane person would have shredded years before.
• There was the time PeopleSoft decided I had started at GDU a year later than I did. If they’d gotten away with that one, it would have shorted me an entire year’s worth of sick-leave pay, to the tune of about $17 an hour. Amazingly, I had the 15-year-old statement of my first paycheck.
• Then the financial managers decided they needed to know how much I’d paid to buy into some Vanguard funds, way back in the early 80s.
• Now we have the proof of value for a rug I haven’t seen in five or six years.
Hoarding has its virtues.
That notwithstanding, I’m emptying all that trash out of there at the earliest convenient moment. Like, probably starting this evening!
I went through one of my paperwork drawers. Found every bank statement and credit card receipt from the time I got my own place in 1996 until somewhere in the early 2000’s when I probably started getting smarter about tossing stuff then moving to online stuff. It was interesting and a little depressing to see how much less I spent on stuff back then. While it was interesting, I tossed most of it into the shredding pile. Next up is going through the old instruction manuals. I throw just about every instruction manual from anything I buy into a pile which has gotten quite large. Pretty sure I don’t need it for the CD player that I bought in the early 1990’s, as I’m sure the CD player is no longer with me (and even if it was, I think I’d have the operation down pat).
The Goodwills in my city take documents for shredding. It is secure and costs $5 a box. Well worth it at my house.
@ Money Beagle: Yeah, I do the same thing with the instruction manuals, mostly because the warranty is usually printed with the manual. Also, I like to have the trouble-shooting section. I think I’ve used those trouble-shooting hints all of…oh, zero times since I started doing this…. Hmmm….
@ Rebecca: The credit union has regular shred-a-thons here. I’ve never heard of Goodwill doing it. I wouldn’t hand over anything that might have a bank account number, though, unless I could stand there and watch it being shredded. The fireplace works handily to get rid of this stuff, and I don’t have to haul it out of the house and across the city. 😉
Well, I don’t have a fireplace so that is out. At Goodwill you stand and watch while they empty your papers into a locked dumpster. They are shredded off site at a regular secure shredding facility. I’m ok with that.
I certainly understand the pain of hauling heavy stuff out of the house.
Yes, sometimes holding on to old paperwork is helpful. When I was going through my divorce a few years ago the ex produced a statement showing he had X dollars in his personal bank account before we got married 11 years earlier. That amount was automatically taken off the top of our joint property. Luckily, I’m a paper pack rat, too, so I could produce my last bank statement from before we married, as well. It was much less than what he had in the bank when we got married, but every little bit counts!
Keep 7 years of everything.
Burn the rest.
The Mrs. is a paper pack rat and I’m telling her to deal with it or just make it go away.
She says I quack at her too much
Maricopa County is having one of their shred events in just a couple of weeks actually. I think the date was March 3rd.
Although there is something to be said for a nice fire.
I make it a policy to scan every piece of paper with any financial or otherwise meaning before getting rid of it but it’s a little harder to run across it by happenstance that way.
I have to keep a comprehensive list of expected tax deductions throughout the year so that I remember to go back and find the scanned documents.
@ Revanche: That is really smart. My scanner is so slow as to be aversive. But clearly scanning this stuff, especially if you can store it to the cloud in a reasonably secure environment (Carbonite, maybe?), is the way to go. I don’t know how I’d ever manage to scan 8 jam-packed file drawers of this stuff…but it would be good at least to start now.
Your list could be converted to a kind of index of scanned documents at the end of each fiscal year and then archived with them.