30 Days to Financial Fitness: Day 6

Day 6 of our step-by-step guide to getting in peak financial shape addresses the need to update your filing system

Christine Benz 18 September, 2012 | 9:06AM Holly Cook
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Day 6: Update Your Filing System
Degree of difficulty: Moderate

Organise your home office and start by revisiting what paperwork you're saving. In my experience, most people save way more financial documents than they need to, and they do so out of habit more than anything else. Your shredder is your friend.

To help determine what to save and what to toss, think about which documents would be a true headache to replace if you needed to. (Do you like waiting in line or on hold with government offices? Didn't think so.) Your passport, driving licence, car registrations documents, property deeds, and marriage, birth, death, and divorce documents, as well as the past seven years' worth of tax returns, fit the bill and therefore should either be stored offsite, in a safe-deposit box, or in an at-home fireproof box.

You'll also want to keep a running file at home to hold any documents related to the current year's tax return. For documents that relate to your household's ongoing financial management--including bank and investment statements and monthly bills--ask yourself whether managing those accounts online and retrieving information on an as-needed basis might not be more efficient than stashing all that financial paperwork at home. The answer is probably yes. And as I noted in Day 3's installment, transacting online also courts less identity-theft risk than does allowing personal information to pass through the mail. Before deciding to go paperless, check up on the thoroughness and ease of use of your financial-service providers' online information systems.

As you sort through your paperwork, you're apt to have come up with a big discard pile. I like to play it safe and shred anything with my name and address on it--if it has more personal information than that, such as an account number, put it in the "definitely shred" pile. Among the discard items that can go straight into the recycling bin are annual reports and prospectuses, warranties and manuals for stuff you no longer own, and marketing literature that accompanies bank and investment statements.

Plan to keep your document up to date, ideally as part of an annual financial checkup.

Return to the article: "The 30-Day Financial Fitness Plan".

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About Author

Christine Benz

Christine Benz  is director of personal finance at Morningstar and author of 30-Minute Money Solutions: A Step-by-Step Guide to Managing Your Finances.

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