Bills, paperwork, and filing are the bane of my existence. I just cannot think of anything more tedious than going through mail and filing it. I’m convinced it’s the first step to getting your house condemned – all those hoarders have piles and piles of papers. It’s a naturally disorganized person’s worst nightmare.
At any time, I usually have at least three of these piles around my house.
If you read my post on using technology for banking, you know that it has simplified much of my bill paying life, and I have the comfort of knowing that the Sheriff won’t be knocking at my door with an eviction notice. But, I have yet to relinquish all to the electronic realm. (I’m getting there – baby steps!) There are some bills and paperwork that probably will never be electronic (medical, dental, etc.)
For bill and paperwork organization, I turn to one of the classic organizational principles: a place for everything, and everything in its place. It seems so simple, right? But it implies that you have the time and energy to put things back in their place (or – if there isn’t a place, deal with the things) each and every time you need to. I know that’s where it falls apart for me.
So, I have learned that I have to make it as simple as possible. You’ll see that this solution is one that I use in many areas of my life. The “place” in question does not have to be that detailed or difficult. In fact, for the naturally disorganized, it’s really better if it isn’t. I’ve seen some pretty awesome filing systems – color coded, alphabetized and prioritized and cross referenced – they look great, and I’m sure they function well for some people, but not for me. The first time I had to find the right colored tab separator in order to add a category, it would fall apart. I know from experience.
The truth is that we don’t need to hold on to a lot of the paper that comes into our homes/lives. At most, you might need a paper copy for 6 months or so. The most efficient thing to do with 99% of it is to open it up, pay it (if you don’t already pay it online), and throw it out (or throw it into the shred pile). But, if you are like I and don’t feel 100% comfortable with that, then you need to have some place to store it.
The Place
Start with the reason you are storing it – obstensibly that reason is that you are storing it because you might need to reference it again. I decided that, if I did need to go back to one of these pieces of paper, that I would probably know approximately what date it was issued (give or take a month). This led me to set up a file system by month. There are a couple of advantages of doing it this way (which I’ll discuss later), but let’s assume you’ll be setting up your file system the same – you’ll need 12 folders. You can make them any size, type, material you want – the only requirement is that they be large enough to fit the amount of paperwork/bills that you get in a month – for me that’s a good inch of envelopes.
You’ll also need somewhere to keep these 12 folders – a file draw works well, but it could be a box or one of those standing dividers – remember, the goal is to keep it simple. I have a 4 drawer filing cabinet that we use for our papers, and one drawer is devoted to our monthly bills, and I use hanging folders for each of the month folders.
This system works well if you do all your bills once a month – I can do that because most of mine are paid on-line, and the ones which I have to actually open and enter into my bill pay application are just a few without late fees and such. But, you can use the system even if you pay bills several times during the month.
Once I’ve paid my bills, I take the stack of envelopes, and I go to the file folder for the calendar month for that day (not when the bill came or when it was due), and I still the stack in that month. Add more throughout the month if necessary. When the month changes, put the new ones in the next month. After a year, when you come to the month that has last year’s bills, you first take out all last years bills from that month – toss, shred, or throw into the long-term filing bin*, then stick the new bills in that folder. That’s it.
This is my filing drawer.
It’s a place for a thing. The theory of having a place is that you know where to find something – and you will know where to find that particular bill. Yes, you may have to go through more than one folder to find it – you swear it was May, but your spouse knows it was June, and you find it in July. Still, that one time of flipping through ~20 envelopes (um, that took 30 seconds), to find the one from Visa to look to see if that charge was on the June bill – well, wasn’t it worth it vs. spending hours filing that Visa bill into the right file folder in the right color?
Or, as it would be in my house – never filing it at all and going through seven or eight piles of paperwork and hope it didn’t get tossed out. Not that it’s ever happened to me . . .
The advantages of choosing a month vs. a day, week, or year are somewhat obvious – a day is too granular – if you filed by day you could have to go through 30-90 folders to find the one bill if you didn’t have a date pinpointed. A year is too big a category – you’d have to go through an every-growing pile each time you needed to find something. Also, how would you purge what needed to be thrown out? If you did it at the end of the year, you’d be purging stuff that was only a month old. Weekly is a possibility, but unless you have a system of paying bills every week, I don’t see any advantage to this.
Like any system, no matter how simple, you still have to do it. I’m guilty of getting through bill paying, then leaving the pile on the counter to file later. Even though my filing system takes another 1 minute, there’s always something to distract me. I also sometimes take my bills to work to look at during a lunch break, and then they sit in on my desk at work or in my laptop bag. I am working on my follow through.
*for those of you who want to keep tax bills, bank statements, or other bills longer than a year, have a storage bin/space for this purpose – again, it doesn’t have to be super organized, just some place. Just label it with the date (year) of the bills you start throwing in there, and when its full, mark it with the end year so you’ll know where to find something or when to throw it out – even the IRS doesn’t require documents to be kept beyond 7 years.
Key takeaways:
- Minimize what comes into the house:
- Switch to electronic copies for anything you can.
- Go online and submit a request to take yourself off catalog and junk mail lists: http://www.dmachoice.org/
- Get rid of any junk mail that comes into your house.
- I do a first sort through the pile of mail, and toss any junk mail directly into the recycle bin. Contrary to popular belief, you do not have to shred anything with your name on it. Your name and address are public record, so you do not need to shred it. You can use your judgement, but really all you need to shred are documents that have your social security number or bank account information.
- Be honest about the catalogs and other junk mail – are you going to buy something from that store? I agree that some catalogs are like fancy magazines and nice to look through, but if you aren’t going to have the time, then ditch them. If you don’t take your name off their list, you know you’ll be getting another one in a matter of weeks anyway.
- Set aside a time to address the remaining bills/correspondence, and file them away as soon as you are done
I’m curious – do you have any tips or tricks for filing bills and paperwork?
