How to Organize Paperwork
/Six days a week we are given a mailbox full of bills, statements, ads, credit card offers, you name it. Five days a week you may have kids handing you assignments, school forms, or classroom schedules. It’s easy to just keeping throwing these papers in a pile to deal with later, but you’re left with a mess of paperwork on the kitchen counter, on the desk in your home office, or on the table in the foyer. All those documents add up fast, and it can be difficult to take the time to sort it out and clear the paper clutter laying around your home.
Create a Drop Zone
It’s really important to have a set landing place for all the paperwork coming in daily. A well-placed basket, bin, or magazine holder can help contain and conceal the incoming paperwork. I use a basket in our laundry room—as we enter the house through the garage, we walk right past the laundry room before coming into the kitchen—I strongly dislike paperwork on my kitchen counters so I catch the papers before they make it that far. Find a spot in your home that makes it easy to collect the paperwork but won’t drive you crazy to look at.
As I carry in the mail, it’s easy to spot the promotional offers, advertisements, credit card offers, etc.—throw these items directly in the trash. Adding junk mail to your basket or bin makes tackling important paperwork much more cumbersome.
Now, you have your basket and it’s starting to fill up with paperwork. Once or twice a week sit down, fill out any necessary forms, pay any bills, and start filing.
Instead of a filing cabinet…
I store all paperwork in three ring binders. A binder is easy to carry around so you can do your filing, well, pretty much anywhere. It makes paperwork easier to see and refer back to if needed. Plus, binders take up a lot less space than filing cabinets. If the thought of re-filing your entire filing cabinet is daunting, start by trying this method out for the current year.
You’ll need a binder for the following categories…
Tax Documents + Financial Records
Use tabbed dividers to file each of your monthly statements: utility bills, phone bills, pay stubs, financial and investment statements, tax documents... most of your paperwork will be stored in this binder.
If you wish to completely eliminate the filing cabinet and use this method for the previous years, that’s excellent! You’ll need 7 binders—one for each year the IRS wants you to hang onto tax returns, W-2s, and investment records. Once I file our taxes, I shred the contents of the oldest binder, and it becomes my binder for the current year.
Property
This is where you will keep real estate records for any property or properties that you own. It’s also a good idea to keep record of improvements to your property.
Instructions + Warranties
Are instruction manuals littered throughout your home? The TV manual is stuffed somewhere in the family room, the dishwasher manual is crammed in the junk drawer, and what about the warranty information for the washer and dryer? At some point, you’ll have a full load of sopping wet laundry and the washer is going to give you some error code—you’ll want that booklet handy. Grab a binder to organize instruction manuals, warranty information, and receipts (if necessary) for items in your home. I use a page protector for each item so all the necessary documents are kept together.
When you sell your home, it’s really considerate to pass along instructions and warranty information of the items being sold with the home (i.e. furnace, air conditioner, large kitchen appliances) to the buyer.
And for those of us with kids…
Schoolwork
School-aged kids bring home a massive amount of paper, at least mine do. Each week we hole-punch and add the schoolwork to a binder. Then, at the end of the school year, we sit down together and pick out the assignments that we want to have as keepsakes—usually the ones that include a drawing, or a writing assignment. It’s nice to look back at all the completed work, and it makes it easier to pick out the things that have meaning.
