Simple rules for organizing family paperwork: what to toss, what to file, and how long to keep each document
The romantic days when people felt excited to see an envelope in their mailbox, eager to discover its contents, are long gone. Today, we know exactly what awaits us: advertising flyers, bank letters, notices from retirement funds, and stack after stack of correspondence from government agencies.
At this point, people fall into three categories: those who pile up unopened letters waiting for a miracle to sort them out, those who open the documents, stare at them briefly, and toss them in the trash thinking “it’s all stored in some computer somewhere anyway,” and those who religiously file every single document in thick, numbered gray and black binders.
The mailbox isn’t the only place where annual statements accumulate. More and more of them arrive via email these days. True, in our modern era you can retrieve much information even without saving it. However, the energy required to do so is significant and unnecessary. The solution: organize your paperwork in a smart, calculated way.
Smart Document Management
Think of your family archive as an important information center for managing household affairs. An archive should be maintained according to clear, simple rules that you follow consistently and responsibly. We recommend these basic guidelines:
Sorting: When you receive mail, decide whether the information requires action from you or not. If action is needed, such as making a payment or updating details that truly need updating, place it in a “documents requiring attention” location. If no action is needed, examine whether the document should be kept or not. For example, when you receive your monthly or bimonthly electricity bill, verify that the amount charged through automatic payment or credit card matches the amount on the statement.
Filing: After sorting and handling the mail, file it in an organized manner: by topic, and within each topic, by date. Consider setting specific retention periods for each type of document to guide your filing decisions.
Disposal: Once a year, let’s say during the second half of January, discard all documents that no longer need to be kept.
What If Most of My Statements Are Digital?
You can receive a large portion of invoices and quarterly and annual reports via email or through self-service portals, secure password-protected areas on the service provider’s website. We recommend saving digital reports in an organized computer folder, thereby reducing paperwork and the effort required to manage it. This requires advance registration for the email statement service. Many organizations encourage these actions to save themselves the hassle and expenses involved in handling mailings.
In 2017, the Israeli Capital Market Authority issued a directive stating that savers and policyholders could choose how to receive their annual report: via text message, email, or postal mail. Since then, if the institution has the saver’s email address or mobile phone number, the annual report will be sent through one of these channels.
If you want to manage all paperwork digitally, you can scan documents that still arrive by mail into the same computer folders (photocopies are accepted as valid evidence in court), though it’s advisable to keep the original documents as well.
Remember, an organized paperwork system isn’t about perfection, it’s about creating a routine that works for you and gives you peace of mind knowing exactly where to find what you need, when you need it.
