How to handle old bills, receipts, statements, etc? (neurotic edition)

June 23, 2023 7:17 PM

For years I never threw out any piece of paper that was vaguely official. However, the accumulation is getting on my nerves. I started scanning & shredding and got through a good chunk of it. But it's eating up a lot of time. Here is my dillemma. On one hand I'd love to just throw it out (after a quick check for truly important items). On the other hand, what if some day, for some reason I suddenly need that gas station receipt from 2017? How can I resolve this?

The papers include important stuff like tax returns and documents from legal proceedings. Obviously scan those. No problem. However, I also have utility bills, retail reciepts, etc.

Why did I keep all that? Idk, you never know. What if I suddenly need to prove I was nowhere near Dubuque, Iowa in early June of 2019? If necessary, I could prove that.

But I understand most people don't think like this. So in part my question is how do most people think? Throw out everything after x number of years?

SIDE NOTE: The stuff I'm referring to is several years old. More recently I've switched to paperless communication where possible and started scanning & discarding things right away otherwise.

posted by trevor_case to Grab Bag (10 answers total)

Best answer: So in part my question is how do most people think? Throw out everything after x number of years?

There are actually recommendations about EXACTLY this, with EXACTLY this kind of guideline. I mention it not only to give you an idea about how to solve for X, so to speak - but also because I think it may be a powerful foil to the neurosis ("Well, if an ACTUAL ACCOUNTANT says it's okay to throw this receipt away, then it is clearly okay").

For individual receipts - nearly everyone says that you can discard those if you've got the credit card statement for that charge. So, even if you DID need to prove you were nowhere near Dubuque in June 2019, the credit card statement from June showing all the charges from stores in Key West or whereever would be all the proof you'd need. (And best of all, if you don't have that credit card statement, you can reprint it from your bank account.)

I keep my bank statements and credit card statements for something like five years (or whatever the guidelines I found said), and then one of the things I do on New Year's Day is go through the files, pull out the oldest years' worth of statements, and shred them. That keeps me on top of things well enough.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 7:40 PM on June 23, 2023 [6 favorites]

if I suddenly need to prove I was nowhere near Dubuque, Iowa in early June of 2019

Well, I'd never remember I was there in the first place and so would never know to look for a gas station receipt ;). And if I did think of it, my credit card receipts would show it and those are available online back to 2016 which is probably when I got the card. It helps that I almost never use cash anymore so bank records or credit card receipts are my primary records anymore and those are online. I do save pdfs and will someday just delete/transfer files when my primary system needs the space.

Back when I did have large stacks, I discarded everything over 7 yrs all without looking. Anything that was likely to be needed either had a more recent version or was available online/institutionally if I really needed it.

For my current daily process, I open the mail by the kitchen trashcan, next to the sink. Using a three-touch rule of open, assess, toss/file, all important papers are set aside to be quickly scanned/filed but there are very few of these. Almost everything is tossed immediately. Anything sensitive is pulped first.
posted by beaning at 7:47 PM on June 23, 2023 [1 favorite]

Best answer: I think most people throw out almost all retail receipts immediately. I would only save a receipt if I thought there was a good chance I might return the item (like if I wasn't sure it was the right size) or if I knew I would need the receipt for a rebate or reimbursement. I would never keep a receipt long term.

I suppose there could be an argument for saving utility bills. You might want to compare current usage and costs to previous months or years. Sometimes you need a utility bill as proof of residence. But I'm sure many people, maybe most people, throw them out immediately after paying them and it's hard to imagine anything bad that could happen as a result.

Don't ask yourself if there's any chance a particular piece of paper could possible ever come in handy, because you can always imagine that somehow it might. Ask yourself, what's the worst thing that could happen if I didn't save this? (The worst thing that actually has a reasonable likelihood of happening, not that someone might accuse you of a murder in Dubuque in June 2019 and it would be hard to prove you weren't there.)
posted by Redstart at 7:50 PM on June 23, 2023 [7 favorites]

Best answer: For me, the tax law locally is 'keep receipts and documents for 7 years'.

When my business was more active, I just kept an box file full of receipts and paperwork for that whole year. And that was kept on a shelf. I had eight box files, so rotated out the oldest as needed, and then relabelled the new year accordingly (shredding all the 8 year old documents at that time).
Now things are much smaller, so they just go into a plastic wallet for each year, with multiple years per box file now. Again shredding when they get 8 years old.

Digital documents and files were kept longer on backup drives, physically archived into a box every few years. Same with my emails backed up externally in case of digital corruption.

And then other physical documents were filed elsewhere, and kept for time respective to their needs. For example instruction manuals would be sorted through each time I moved house, a small number of select physical documents were put into a 'nostalgia box' for triggering memory recall. But largely old paperwork was shredded and recycled.
posted by many-things at 7:50 PM on June 23, 2023 [1 favorite]

Best answer: I do not keep retail receipts except for very brief durations regarding specific purchases I have reason to think I'll need physical record of, or if I can't log the purchase in the budget at that exact time and will need the reference. Gas stations actually fall into the first category for me because I want an easy rebuttal to hypothetically being accused of having stolen fuel shortly after driving off, but I don't keep them past the end of the trip, if even that. For most anything else I actually want a record of, I just take a photo with my phone and then toss it. I figure that, even if very occasionally this practice bites me and I can't return something I could have otherwise, that's never going to be anything very high-value. And honestly I'm having difficulty thinking of any actual incidents of such a thing happening within the past five years. Almost everywhere I buy non-food items at will look up my prior purchases for me, sends electronic invoices, or is a sufficiently local place that they'd accept it back anyway. Even if hypothetically once every five years I got burned on a fifty dollar item (again: unlikely), that's $10/yr for the privilege of not keeping or scanning any bits of register tape. That is acceptable to me. I also find the aggregate total possibility over my lifetime of truly needing a specific scrap of paper as my sole alibi an acceptable risk, vs the stress and hassle of actually keeping all such scraps and maintaining a robust enough filing system for them that I would plausibly find what I needed in such an event.
posted by teremala at 5:28 AM on June 24, 2023

I used to save receipts from everything/everywhere. It was getting out of hand so one day I decided it's all going in the circular file. What I found going through them is almost every receipt had faded and nothing was legible. The only ones to survive were hand written.

So why save them in the first place? As was mentioned above, if you have credit card & bank statements, you're good.
posted by james33 at 6:03 AM on June 24, 2023 [2 favorites]

James33 makes a good point above - most receipts tend to he on crappy paper with crappy ink because the expectation now is that you only need them until you get the credit card statement or bank statement they're on, or if you need to return the thing for some reason. They are intended to be very temporary.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 6:11 AM on June 24, 2023 [1 favorite]

Best answer: Note that "receipts" in retention contexts generally has to do with expensed items and write-offs. If you got reimbursed by work for that gas you got (you should have given them either the original or a scan), if you are claiming your new $1000 grill as a business expense, you should have a retention plan for the receipt (and warranty info).

You do not need to keep your personal grocery or gas station or pizza receipts for 7 years.

The ONLY other paper copies of anything I keep (if I even have a paper copy) are for big-ticket items that have warranties or otherwise have some kind of lifespan I need to care about - the fridge and washer and dryer, all the paperwork and work orders for some replacement windows and roofing, that kind of stuff I photograph and put in Evernote but I do have a folder the actual paper goes to live in. I do also have a folder for all my invoices from the mechanic, but when I sold my last cars I realized they file everything with Carfax so I do photograph them to Evernote so I can easily search the text in them (when WAS that last transmission service??) but I only keep the most recent one or two in the glovebox and then toss.

Basically you should keep anything the IRS knows about or could reasonably ask about.

And you should keep anything that might be the only proof of purchase you can obtain for a big-ticket item or work performed, for as long as you might reasonably need to show that to someone if there's an issue. More often this is all handled electronically, but there's weird stuff that gets done manually sometimes.

Plus you should maintain a set of stuff that proves you exist - birth certificate, marriage license, name change decree, car insurance, at least photocopies of DL and passport so you can retrieve the numbers - but this should live in your Go Bag, so that if you have to leave on very short notice you at least can prove who you are and what neighborhood you live in, in case there's controlled re-entry after a natural disaster or accident.

But unless you are living an all-cash lifestyle, your purchases and whereabouts are well-documented in many other ways.
posted by Lyn Never at 6:36 AM on June 24, 2023 [3 favorites]

I have kept all the tax records from a small business.1 box.
I keep all tax returns; my ex- took some.
I try to keep resumes.
Post Covid, I use a credit card for 95% of stuff, so nor a big deal.
posted by theora55 at 10:43 AM on June 24, 2023

Best answer: I agree with what everyone has said above. But just another idea.

There are some documents you need to keep the original of: your birth certificate, wills, deed to your home, etc. There are some it probably makes sense to keep high quality scans of: 7-10 years worth of tax documents, important medical documents, etc. But if there are some that you can't bring yourself to throw out "just in case," even though rationally you know you're unlikely to need them, don't bother with the time and annoyance of scanning them: just take a photo with your phone. Throw all those photos in a folder on your computer and forget about them, and shred the originals. It's so much faster, the quality isn't much worse given how good phone cameras are these days. And in any circumstance where a scan of a receipt would be, for example, admissible in court as an alibi, a legible photo would also still work for the same purpose.

Hopefully the advice you're getting from others will help you feel more comfortable trashing more paper you don't need. But if you're still on the fence or anxious about a lot of documents, you can definitely save time with photos instead of scans.
posted by decathecting at 1:14 PM on June 24, 2023