

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. 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.
