Do your children or goods inheritors a huge favor. Recycle, shred, and otherwise sort all your old paperwork. My mother-in-law, rest her soul, retained seemingly every piece of paper across 50+ years of her personal and professional life. I can see why: most of it was useful for a few months to even a decade later. But then 100% pointless for her or anyone else. There's a huge effort to go in and process that…so she didn't. Now her children have put in ~100s of hours in processing it.
An automatic-feeding document scanner helps if you’re worried you’ll want the info someday. Then you can shred with confidence. It’s much easier for heirs to just delete the folder if they don’t find value in it when you’re gone, and it’s easier for them to keep if they want it just-in-case.
@glennf
Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes!
Am going through this now with my uncles estate.
Don’t keep checks for checking accounts that no longer exist. Don’t keep documents from the purchase of a house you sold 40 years ago.
Don’t keep every receipt you ever got for the past 25 years.
@bxknits@glennf For some reason I cannot quite understand, I have saved every receipt for all of my adult life. I have them stored in separate expandable folders for every year, with internal slots for each month. There have been a few times that it has been useful to refer back to one, but the ink has faded on many of them.
I cannot make myself throw the old ones out...if there are some advancements in scanning technologies in the future, this could be invaluable data for someone's PHD!
@hoadlck Our brains all work differently and some people's are material-retention-oriented. There's often a lot of shame around this, but it's just how we're made? There are strategies to get rid of stuff with help from organizers or even therapists, but the fundamental thing is: unless you can get an institution to accept your receipts as a donation and catalog them, no archivist will ever see them.
@glennf FIL had years and years of business records that I spent many an hour burning out several cheap Staples shredders to 'properly' dispose of. Sometimes the stuff find in a semi-trailer full of paper records is just worth setting fire to….
@pejacoby we are shredding very little. Recycling is almost never the source of identity theft unless you’re targeted. Most of the financial stuff we’ve found involve ancient accounts.
@glennf I will leave a negligible footprint. The road towards that goal started recently, and will take years if not decades. I'm excited to work on this. (I'm a minimalist OCD neat freak.)
@glennf 100% agree. Had this with my father. Boxes and boxes of paperwork such as notepads full of packing lists for weekend trips 20 or 30 years prior with a certificate recognising his 40 years of service as an employee of the City of Sydney Council between them. As we got into the sorting I almost said to my brother, “let’s just recycle the lot”. So, so draining.
@glennf my siblings and I moved our parents to an independent living community a few years ago. The four of us (plus spouses) all came to help clean out the house. I had vertigo at that time, so I got the job of sorting and shredding. I kid you not - it took me 5 full days to sort and shred their 30+ years of papers and statements. Ironically, the two most important pieces of papers were not among the pile that I had to sort - the title to their car and their house!
@demeterinsf Yow! That's the right way to do it, though—just plow through it or you wind up spending years (as we have). The storage locker with my MIL’s stuff is about 30 minutes away near their former retirement place. But cheaper there than in Seattle, for sure.
@glennf
I've asked my children to pick any of my architectural drawings they want to keep, and to burn the rest. I can't bear to shred that many thousands of hours of work.
@mizblueprint That is also good! I have given my children (and my wife has too) to literally throw 100% of everything out. Like, they aren't even required to look at it. However, I also am doing them the gift of making sure anything historically valuable is labeled and has a place it's going to—I have small but vital collection of printing and comics history stuff, and I know the museums that will take most of it. (In fact, I have some forms to fill out ahead of time!)
I did think at times, why did she keep this? It wasn’t garbage or junk mail. And it was hard to get back paperwork or data, bank statements or whatever, in the past! We have tossed a lot of old bank statements and stuff over the years. At one, we brought 75 lbs of stuff to a UPS Store for shredding. I've taken 100s of lbs since to the regular shredding events run by my credit union.
@glennf I cleaned out my dad's house this summer. He had 3 file cabinets full of student files, exams, etc. going all the way back to the 70s on top of his piles & piles of old bills & all the other papers. That was essentially my summer, because I had to have hands/eyes on every piece of paper due to SS numbers & other sensitive info.
@Nshrubs I hear you and sorry you had to do so much work. Each piece of paper retained is seconds or longer of a descendent's lifetime! My wife helped her parents through FOUR successive moves (growing up house to retirement to partial assisted living to full assisted living), and so the remaining material is just what's left over from that…the that requires the MOST attention.
@aleen I am so sorry. I definitely got more insight today than I have in years of watching Lynn work on this and sometimes being invited to help. I suddenly realized how valuable paper trails were! And when do any of us have time and mental space to look at old papers?!
@glennf The one exception is investment statements—my husband had to do a lot of digging, sussing out the history of a relative’s investment account that she inherited as a quasi-trust. A lot of the records were shredded (I guess on the supposition that it was just like the 7-year tax records rule) and it took a huge amount of forensic investigation (including booting up an old, old computer!) to work out what went where.
@glennf Argh, I totally relate to this. My brother and I recently moved our dad into memory care and are clearing the house. He never threw ANYTHING out but he also never kept it in any order. So we're just as likely to find land deeds mixed in with a pile of 30 year old xmas cards. Every single thing has to be reviewed in case it relates to the house etc., it's exhausting. On the other hand, I've been able to destroy a pile of my own baby pictures which has been satisfying...
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