How do you organize bills/paperwork at home? Do you use filing cabinets, accordion folders, banker boxes, something else? Do you sort by year or by type (e.g. electricity bills in one file, phone bills in another, or all bills from one year in one place?). Some of our bills are e-bills, so I just keep them on my computer, but we still get paper bills for certain things and I need paper copies of certain bills for my business. I currently have my business stuff separate from our home stuff, and it's vaguely organized, but I need a new/better system.
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This is not my system, it's my husband's...he uses a yearly binder system. He has one of those huge 4 inch binders per year and it has everything in it related to that year, statements, EOBs from our health insurance, statements from childcare, etc.
Tax forms are kept separately.
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I wouldn't claim my system is the best, but here goes:
I have a mail bin by the door where I keep all the mail. Every month, I pull it out and go through it, throw most of it away, and keep the bills. I have an accordian folder for every month and I store the bills in there by month (with a note on each one of when it was paid and a confirmation number or check number). I don't keep regular bills (electric, gas, landscaping, phone, etc) longer than a year, so when I'm paying May 2017 bills, I'll throw out May 2016 bills and put the new bills in the "May" slot.
I try to keep health insurance and bills for ~5 years. Our previous insurance would send us everything by person, so each person (Mom, Dad, Xander, Logan) had a file in a filing cabinet, but our new insurance doesn't do that, so now I'm sorting them by "Insurance info" and "Costs" by year. So I have a "2016 - Insurance" folder with all the EOBs from 2016, and a "2016 - Health Costs" folder with all the bills and pharmacy receipts from 2016.
Those are our main things. Our filing cabinet also has car insurance, home owner's insurance, life insurance, mortgage information, taxes, and other stuff.
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@looch: @Adira: maybe I should try yearly. Our stuff is vaguely grouped by theme.
I hesitate to throw away certain bills. I recently had to find old bills/statements (of which we only had paper copies) for administrative purposes, and the pain of hunting for all of those papers made me want to get more organized and is also deterring me from throwing away certain things.
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I have everything sorted by the company that sends the bill. I periodically take older things out when I need space. We have a giant filing cabinet that we use. The paid bills pile up on my desk until I go through and file everything. I pay them as I receive them. I don't love my system but I can find pretty much any bill very quickly!
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@sunny: he he. The growing pile of bills on my desk is what prompted me to ask for advice! I keep not doing anything with them since I know I want to change my system!
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I've converted nearly everything to paperless (because I hated having to hold onto this crap). But now, any paper bills are thrown away as soon as they are paid. If I ever need to reference a past bill, the company can send it.
They do make small scanners that are great for things like this. I borrowed one from a friend to scan receipts (it just sucks the paper through the scanner, and saves it as a small file). If you have Dropbox or similar service, you don't have to worry about scans taking up space on your computer.
For things I cannot throw out (like past taxes, etc.), I keep them in a small file box that's organized into a few categories.
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