My Paperless Filing System
Going paperless has been one of the best decisions I have made in this minimalism journey! I actually decided to go paperless before I called myself a minimalist. When we moved into our house I bought this beautiful dark wood filing cabinet. It was so heavy that it took 3 men to move it up to the office. Well, 2 years later the office became a nursery and the filing cabinet was moved into the closet. Fast forward to my work time being when baby is sleeping and of course, I needed to get to the filing cabinet. And no one wants to chance waking a sleeping baby! I’m not sure what finally did it for me, but I decided I no longer needed the filing cabinet and I was going paperless.
I now own a very small accordion file folder. (You can find one HERE.) This houses all of the paperwork that I need to keep the original physical copies. These include, birth certificates, social security cards, anything that is notarized, etc. At the end of this blog post I will link some sites that might help you decide what to keep and what to toss or scan. I am not a tax professional, so you will need to make these decisions on your own.
Over the past few years this has come up in conversation and people seem terrified of not having physical paper copies of things. Let me point out a few things that might put your mind at ease.
Receipts - scanning a receipt is the safest way to save it. With the way they are printed, they usually being illegible within a few months.
Tax documents - when it the last time you mailed in physical tax paperwork? This is now done online. My tax guy will send me my final documents through a secure portal on his website. Rather than print these out, I just download them and move them to the hard drive.
Here are a few pointers:
You need a good scanner. We have a good small scanner that works well for photos. However, this only scans one document at a time. I had hundreds of pieces of paper that needed scanning. I chose a high quality scanner. The price tag is steep, but it is worth every penny.
When it came to my bank statements from previous years, rather than do them by the month, I just put them in perfect order and scanned an entire year at once. Going forward I do each month individually. If I need just one paper from these larger scans I can easily just save those single pages as a new file.
I also threw out an entire trash bag of manuals. I keep these in Evernote. HERE is the blog post detailing that out.
I do back this up on a flash drive that I keep in a separate location. If you only have PDFs saved, it will not take up much room. You do want a back up. I do have photos on my hard drive as well that are not saved on the flash drive. So you can even get started with a large flash drive if you would like.
On the note of security, do not save these files on your computer on on a cloud. These are private documents. This is why I keep these on an external harddrive.
Here are the steps I followed:
Gather all of your paperwork. If you have paper piles or filing cabinets in more than one room, be sure to bring it all together for this first step. A dining table that you can borrow for a few days is great place to get started with this.
Now that you have it all in one place, decide what you’re keeping. I discovered that I actually didn’t need utility receipts from 10 years ago. But I do want to scan in the document showing that I paid my car off in 2010.
Create zones for your papers. Some examples are: Medical, Financial, Auto, etc.
You can do this while you are sorting - you need to decide what you’re keeping and what you’re shredding or tossing. Shred anything with social security numbers or other personal information.
Before you begin scanning, decide how you are going to categorize your digital files. This is extremely important. I have included a graphic to show how I name my files to keep them in order. (The graphic is below. Add letters for things specific to your needs.)
Scan the file and name it:
I first name the file with the letter corresponding with the category.
Next, if it pertains to a certain family member I use their initials.
Date.
When I am finished I move these into folders to make it easier to find things.
Let’s use an example. My son (let’s pretend his initials are ABC) goes to the doctor for his check up. They send me home with a sheet explaining what to expect this year and all the tests and results. I would categorize it like this: M ABC 2020_10 Checkup This translates as: Medical Person ABC that happened in October of 2020 and it was a check up.
For new tires for a vehicle it would look something like this: A 2020_10 Ford Truck Tires
We sold a car a little over a year ago and we had recently purchased new tires. While standing in our kitchen the couple asked for the paperwork. I cannot tell you how amazing it was to go grab my external hard drive, hook it up to my computer and just search “Prius tires.” I could have printed it out for them, but they just wanted me to email it to them. It took a minute. How embarrassing would it have been if I had to go up to the filing cabinet and pray it was in the right folder? I distinctly remember having to take a half-day off work when we were first married to find a piece of paper. That is not the life I want to live!
So yes, this is a big commitment on the front end. But I promise you that the dividends are huge!
What if you don’t want to take the time to go through all of your old papers right now? While I highly recommend doing this at some point, you can start with the paper that comes in your house each day. You can start today. I have a folder labeled “To Scan.” This is for anything that comes in my house that I would typically need to file in a filing cabinet. At the end of each month I take a few minutes to “file” my paperwork. We do not own a filing cabinet. You can find how I deal with daily paperwork HERE.
Imagine this. Imagine the next time you move, what if you never what to move with a filing cabinet again? Sounds pretty good!
Links to products: Click the links below. Note: These are affiliate links. I might receive some compensation at NO cost to you.
Websites to help you decide what to keep:
https://clark.com/personal-finance-credit/how-long-keep-documents/
https://www.suzeorman.com/resources/record-keeping