How quickly it piles up

I just finished our taxes for this year – wading through piles of receipts, check registers, and credit card bills to document legitimate deductions for our businesses, tallying our income and expenses. I’m old-fashioned and do everything by hand. Phew, done. It’s in the hands of the accountant now.

I’m a reasonably organized person when it comes to paperwork, but moving to a new home and then doing our taxes underscored a problem: I keep a lot of old junk. You know how it goes when moving; pack it up and sort it later. Well, “later” arrived and it was time to sort.

Old and unneeded paperwork piles up quickly, doesn’t it? Here’s proof.

This is several years’ worth of stuff – old bills, superfluous records, receipts from 20-year-old tax records. I keep all our tax filings, of course, but after 10 years or so, I won’t bother keeping the stacks of canceled checks that documented our expenses. Out it goes.

For obvious reasons, this isn’t something I just want to throw in the trash. Instead I packed two laundry baskets brimful, hauled it outside into the snow …

…and fed it into the burn barrel.

About sixty pounds of paper, reduced to a few ounces of ashes. The file drawers are much happier, and everything is better organized now. Woot!