Tax season is always a good opportunity to clear out old paper work and review file systems. Financial documents are the easiest to purge, organize and archive, and health records are not too difficult either. It’s the rest of the nebulous stuff lurking behind manila walls that can be daunting to address. Getting through the whole system in one or two sittings will leave you feeling as light and refreshed as a spring morning.
Get out one category at a time and start making sense of it. Since it is an easy win and since you are likely to have been handling documents related to it recently, start with the financial category. Organize by institution (bank, mortgage lender, brokerage firm, etc.) and within those categories by date. Your CPA can tell you what is safe to shred, usually anything older than seven years, but I hear from clients that a lot of CPAs are now saying three years. Most of us have had our financial information backed up in digital format for quite a while now, so it makes sense that we wouldn’t have to retain paper documents very long if at all.
For health documents and medical records, you might organize by type (nutrition, bloodwork, skin, prescription information) or by doctor’s name or a combination. Within those categories, organizing by date is helpful. It should be pretty easy to decide which documents to purge, for example, a diet you tried that you wouldn’t revisit or information on prescriptions you no longer take (all that information is online if you need it).
You might like to retain old health information to compare it with your current status. For example, if you recently started eating well and exercising, it could be motivating to compare bloodwork from when your habits weren’t as healthy. It’s certainly easier to pull out and look at the paper copies than it is to request them from your doctor. The single occasion I asked for some records from a doctor the documents couldn’t be located due to what they claimed was a mix-up at a storage facility. Not very reassuring!
The following categories are usually what’s left: Auto, Insurance (all types), Important Documents, Receipts, Interior Design, Garden, Letters (from family and friends), Inspiration, Travel, Work Support Materials, Recipes, Music, College Papers, and the list can go on. What people store in their file cabinets, beyond the financial and medical records, is as individual as they are and depends on how attached they still are to paper. For a lot of us, Pinterest and digital methods of saving ideas, for example, just aren’t as satisfyng.
Most of these categories get stagnant. It never seems to be a priority to purge through the Home Décor Ideas folder or the Beauty files, for example. But it can be really worthwhile to look through all the magazine pages you have torn out over the years and filed away. Some will still speak to you and some will be easy to toss. The best part is that revisiting inspirational and aspirational files can remind us of a dream that we had that might be time to bring into reality. Maybe it’s time to take a trip to Tokyo, Oaxaca or Mallorca, for example, or start researching an idea for a book you’ve wanted to write or try a recipe for an Easter feast or a way to dye eggs using beet and other vegetable juices.
A thorough purge should create plenty of room to do any filing of current papers that you’ve put off. Space makes filing much easier. If you find one category is starting to overwhelm your cabinet, purge through it. If it is still hefty, consider moving it to deep storage if it is a category you don’t reference. Letters from family, once they have been read, might be a good category for a file box in the attic or garage. Now that I am in my 60s, letters definitely take up too much room in my file cabinet, but they are hard to let part with. I think it’s time to box them.
Another category that could easily live elsewhere is Manuals. Do you even really need the manual? A tea pot, for example, is pretty straightforward to clean and operate. Ditto old Tax Records. Not only do you probably have a digital copy available online for any manual, you typically won’t have to reference them often if at all, so they can live in a banker’s box outside the main file cabinet.
Keep your files fresh and reflective of your life as you’re living it now. Imagine your file cabinet as a closet for paper. When open it should be easy to find things and a pleasure to use. Think of the documents as clothes and keep only those that are necessary, useful or inspiring and that fit your life as it is today.