Cleaning Out Old Mail
I store most of my old mail in a huge shoe box. I decided to do some cleaning and took it out last night. I spent about an hour going through all the mail and threw out 95% of them. I had mail back from 2002. There's really no point for me to keep any bill statements prior to this year. I can get access to my statements online now and there’s hardly any need for mail dating two years back or more. So I didn’t hold back and just let go of all the paper statements. Every time I get rid of junk in my apartment, I feel good. This kind of mail cleaning should be done at least once a year.
There was still another huge stack on my table not shown in picture.
posted by Sean @ 7/01/2005 10:00:00 AM
4 Comments:
On the other hand, if you do want to keep some of your mail, you can save a lot of room by getting rid of the envelopes and any useless inserts and ads. I keep my old bills in a file cabinet - each type with their own folder. Then if I did want to clean some of it out, I could do it in an organized fashion: e.g. want to get rid of bank statements over 3 years old? They're all in the bank folder, in reverse chronological order.
I'm in the process of purging my files, too, and I'm curious to know if you're doing anything about shredding. I have a home shredder, but it would take hours with the volume of stuff. I'm looking into perhaps outsourcing this job, but I'll make a concrete move on that after I've finished the purge. At any rate, are you just chucking it or are you eliminating any identifying names/accounts?
I like to get rid of any useless junk files asap. After I pay off my bills, the statement immediately goes into the paper shredder. I just love that shredding sound!
Brian,
With identity theft at such a high stake now, I've decided to shred all confidential information. Since I don't have a shredder at a home, I took all my papers to work. =) I dumped everything into the shredder box. My company outsources the shredding work to a third party.
Money Turtle,
The problem with shredding them immediately is that if you need to go back to them, you wouldn't have it. I would hold them for a period of time just in case, unless you have the info online.
Post a Comment
<< Home