One Tip Wednesday

One Tip Wednesday is back! Life has finally slowed down and I will be once again posting some of the ways I organize my life and my home. And I would love to read about how you organize as well!

Last year, I posted about this pile of papers that was disrupting my life. Seriously! I couldn't keep track of anything coming or going out of the house. I missed paying a couple of bills and this stack kept growing and I had to do something! This was about a years worth of filing that had overtaken the mail slots built into my cabinet over my desk. So first I started by getting it all filed away into my filing cabinet or to the shredder.

Then I came up with a system for organzing all of the mail coming in and out of the house. You can read about how that works HERE.

So at the end of the year, I had three very full folders with everything from the year. I kept them in the very front of my filing cabinet so they were easy to access. But the real question is, how would it work for me at the end of the year? It worked great all through the year to help me keep track of things. I would even clip appointment cards for Dr visits and such on the front of that months folder to help me remember. Anything that I needed for that month, I just slid into the folder. But would I have to spend all afternoon filing anyway?

I pulled out the papers for each month and made piles across my table, light bill in one, phone bill, insurance statements, and so on. In my filing cabinet, I file oldest to newest, so I just started in January and started stacking them on top of each month. Anything that I didn't need to save, I put in the shred pile.

In about 30 minutes it was all sorted across my table.

And my folders were empty and ready to use again.

I then filed the papers into my file cabinet. In about an hour, I was finished. So for me, this system is a total success!

For many of you, you likely don't save each of your monthly bills, but my husband likes to keep 3 years of most of our bills. Our entergy bills for lights, water and gas we keep. I like to be able to go back and reference what we paid in the same months in different years and it will be helpful when we prepare to sell our home to be able to give an average of our entergy cost. Any medical or insurance cost, you usually should keep for 7 years if you have used it on your taxes. If you work from home of course, the tax rules are very different. My understanding is that anything you file on your taxes should be kept for 7 years.

If you have an organizational tip, old or new, that you would like to share - add your link below!