turning piles of paperwork into an organized system
Since moving into our house last June R and I have had no real system for organizing bills and papers. We each had a file box with some important papers, but a lot of bills and reciepts and whatnot had been piling up in various places. So I decided to bite the bullet and sort it all out. These are the papers after I sorted them into various categories. I also threw away a full garbage bag of papers. (The cat wouldn't leave me alone, so he's in the pic, too.)
Here is the finished file box. The yellow files are mine, the red files are R's, and the blue are joint papers.
Here is my finished system. The files are in the black box, reciepts are in the polka-dotted photo box and the binder is my home-management notebook.
I also set two pottery bowls on top of our secretary desk– one for receipts and one for papers that need to be dealt with. It is my intention that the bowls be a temporary parking place for mail, and that no papers hang out on the kitchen table. I'll let you know how it goes.
Any tips or suggestions? How long is a reasonable amount of time to save, say, phone bills? What sort of schedule do you keep for paying bills and organizing paperwork? Daily? Weekly? Every other blue moon?
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I am the most disorganized person in the world. And what is up with cats having to in between a person and their papers. My cat is famous for that!
Karen Travels’s last blog post..Sharing Alaska
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Ha! My cats are so in on whatever I happen to be doing. Here is my other cat, being a dork. I'm not torturing him; he just looks startled all the time. Disorganized is OK, too! Don't let anyone tell you otherwise.
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Just a quick question for you. The box of receipts, are the receipts piled on the inside or are they organized in some way in there? I love the idea of a box for receipts, so I'm curious how you do it. I've been having such trouble figuring out how to organize my receipts, even temporarily. My fiance has even worse receipt habits, so I'm trying to come up with a solution to help both of us.
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Hi Jen, nice to meet you. I read a post somewhere (can't remember where, sorry) about organizing paperwork. The writer said he just chucks receipts into a box. At the end of the year he seals the box up and labels it– the rationale being that you rarely if ever need to access a particular receipt anyway, and if you do they're there. My coworker told me she staples her receipts to her credit card statement at the end of the month, but she's only able to do that because she pays for most everything by credit card. I digress. Hope this helps. Good luck!
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Thanks so much for the ideas. I might try one of those.
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