GOOD BYE PAPER CLUTTER...HELLO NEW BILL PAYING SYSTEM...

I am soo proud of me...lookie at what I tackled today(I wish I had a battery for my camera so you all could look!)

In September, my family and I started our home management binder to become more organized and to get/keep our house clean, you can read about that HERE .As of today, it's still working out great!! But, in order to have a really clean house, the clutter has to go bye bye. Today, I was on a mission to get rid of the paper clutter that had piled up over the year. Yes, you heard right...a year. (heck, I'm going to embarrass myself and tell you all that some of it was dated 2005) . What would happen was, we would bring in the mail, look through it quickly, pick out the bills to be paid and put them in a basket, lay the rest of the mail on the dining room table, pay the bills (hardly ever on time, because we would always write down on a piece of paper what we were going to pay and when, and then IT would be throwed in that pile of other mail that was already on table ). And when you know that you're going to have company, you HAVE to do something with that mess on the table. So we would gather it all up and throw them in an empty box or bag and take them to another room where noone will see them. After a year or more of that kind of habit, you have quite the collection of paper clutter. After seeing that our new chore sheets are working out great, (by setting new habits) I decided to find a new system to keep/pay/file our bills. I searched the net over to try and find a system that might work for us, and I'm hoping that the bill paying system here will work. Along with setting new habits when it comes to the mail, I think it will!! Soooo, since about 4:30 this morning, I have been shredding and filing. I printed off all the papers I needed for this bill paying system, found the rest of the bills that needed to be paid for October and put them in the binder. I also set up November's bill sheet, and it's ready to roll. Now I have a question for ya...how long do you really need to hold on to utility bill receipts, bank statements, etc? It seems like every website I go to has a different time frame. Some say pitch them when you get the new one in, some say keep them for a year, etc. How long do you keep yours? Have you ever pitched something only to find out that 6 months down the road you need a copy of that item you pitched?