![how to organize your bills and receipts how to organize your bills and receipts](https://www.believeinabudget.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Sample-of-Checkbook-Register-Method-Fixed-and-Variable.png)
Then think about your schedule - how your day goes, how your week goes, and what you do seasonally - to help you find convenient times to keep your filing system up to date.Īn inbox doesn’t work for me. Think about why you need these records and how you use them. You’ll know if the system you set up doesn’t work for you – because you won’t use it! Start with the end in mind. Again back to the labels, I use the P-Touch label maker by Brother to make the tabs stand out. I like how the plastic section labels can be moved so they’re all on the right side, the left side, the middle, or anywhere in between. I use Pendaflex hanging folders in different colors as a cue so I can easily see where the different topical sections in the filing cabinet begin and end. It keeps the labels from lifting off the folder and it keeps them clean as well. The color-coded labels tend to lose their adhesion and come off, so I put a Smead clear label protector on the folder as well. That tells me at a glance which year’s receipts are in a particular folder and/or how many years I’ve had a particular account (because I keep adding each year’s label to topical folders). Again, not a necessity, but I really appreciate the year stickers. I also have a bunch of Smead color-coded alphabetic labels left over, so I use them too. It’s certainly not a necessity, but it makes me happy. I still use the Dymo Twin Turbo label maker I bought years ago when I had my own company. Here’s a simple checklist to get you started!Īnd I love it when my labels are printed and look professional. But generally, you should keep documents that help you prove your income and how you spent it, documents that help you manage your finances, documents of legal significance, medical records, and things that are important to you or of interest to you. What you need to keep – a simple checklist!Įveryone is different, so it’s not easy to come up with a hard-and-fast list of all the documents you should maintain.
![how to organize your bills and receipts how to organize your bills and receipts](https://www.ourfreakingbudget.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/040913.organize_feat.web_.jpg)
Do you need to keep all of the declarations pages for your auto insurance since the inception of the policy or is it enough to keep the most recent page? Maybe you decide to keep a year’s worth or the last five years or whatever. When you’re adding to a topical file, for instance, think about whether you need to keep every …. I haven’t done this yet, but I want to start giving each file an expiration date so I know when it’s okay to discard or destroy the documents. But I still think it would be nice to have each year’s records in its own box.Ī good filing system includes a plan for when to dispose of records too. You can take organization even further by creating a list of each box’s contents if you want to, but I haven’t spent the time to do that because the contents are fairly consistent year to year. The larger size is still a little too big, so I decided to keep other things with the records - like Christmas cards that have family photos and other mementos of things that happened during the year. But I couldn’t find exactly what I wanted, so I opted for a larger size and now keep two years’ worth of records in each box. I wanted to keep all the records for the year in one little plastic box so I could just grab the year I was interested in and leave the rest in storage. In the end, I decided that smaller plastic boxes would be easier. Read more: Don’t give your Social Security number at these places! Yes, they were out of the way in storage but if I needed some of the records, I had to get all the records. But it didn’t really work well for me because the larger bin was too big, heavy, and unwieldy.
![how to organize your bills and receipts how to organize your bills and receipts](https://i.pinimg.com/474x/15/b3/be/15b3be7da1bf6db26bcbf94543b9e74a--bill-organization-financial-organization.jpg)
I used to keep them in a larger plastic bin, and I could keep something like five years of records in one box. Here’s what I keep a copy of:Įvery year, I move the monthly folders and tax folders into a plastic filing box and put them in storage. That way, if one of our wallets (or anything in them) is lost or stolen, I have the correct contact information within reach. I made copies of everything in our wallets and keep the folders in the topical folders section.