OK, we've sorted out all your paperwork. Time to get organised!
Group into Categories
As you have been going through your paperwork you will have started to gain some familiarity with it. You will have seen the same policy numbers come up again and again. This should make it fairly easy to group your piles into categories. The categories should be:
- Financial – anything to do with money, which includes bank statements, investment and pension details, State pension information
- Work – payslips, P60s, annual review documents, the record of that time you were called into HR for photocopying your backside; anything to do with your job
- Medical – anything to do with your medical or dental history or arrangements. Upcoming appointments, letters from your GP or consultant
- Insurance – even though this is technically financial, most of us have several different insurance arrangements and it is useful for them to be grouped together. They should include car, house, medical and life insurance
- Cars – cars tend to come with a lot of paperwork, from the V5 logbook to MOT certificates to service records
- Rooms – this is the category for the receipts and guarantees that we were talking about in the last section
What about if something logically falls into more than one category? For example, car insurance documents. Should they go in the car section or the insurance section? I think this is a judgement call and I wouldn't overthink it.
Worst case, you have two places to look for the document you need; this won't hold you up for too long. And in any case when you're done with your filing and labelling, you'll be able to see what you need easily.
Create and Fill Files
Now you have categories of files and all that remains to be done is actually to file them.
Pick a category to work on first – Financial, for example. Take each pile in this category and determine what it is, for example Pete’s Aviva pension, policy number ABC123456.
Take a square cut file and place it on the table with the fold facing towards you. The fold will be at the bottom of the filing cabinet, so the long open end will be at the top. Near the top (I do this at the top right) write Aviva Pension – Pete, ABC123456. Put the papers in the folder.
Put the folder in a hanging file and create a label for the file. You may need to abbreviate a bit, and it's probably not necessary to put the policy number on the label. Pete's Aviva Pension will do.
Do this for every pile in the financial category, then move on and do the same for all the other categories. You will end up with a bunch of hanging files, each with one square cut folder in it.
The idea is that you can open your filing cabinet, quickly find what you're looking for, reach in and take out the folder, leaving the hanging file in place. Then when you’re done, it’s dead easy to see where it fits. It might seem like overkill but believe me, it works really well.
Archive or Destroy
Whenever I have gone through this process with a client, there is often some pushback about getting rid of documents. “What if I need these at some point in the future?” they will say. I once went through this process with a couple where the husband was a solicitor.
He actually wasn't present so I suggested that we not destroy any documents that we had decided we didn't need anymore. I figured that as he was a lawyer he probably wanted to err on the safe side.
I was right – he ended up taking the piles of mobile phone bills from 15 years earlier and putting them in bin bags in the loft. Personally, I don't think I could sleep at night knowing all that unnecessary paper was sitting above my head, but it takes all sorts!
If you can't bring yourself to shred old paper, then archive it instead. I would definitely suggest boxes rather than bin bags, and make sure your archive boxes are labelled correctly. At least then you know where they are there should you ever need them in future, even though you almost certainly won't!
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