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Best Ways to Organize Bills?
scorp1us asks: "Every year on the 1st of January, I start a new set of folders for storing my bills. Generally, I keep everything divided up by account. But this seems to take too long. I wait 3-6 months and get a big pile nad have to go about sorting it. I have been considering a per-month scheme - all bills go to one folder, each month. With all the CS people out there studying sorting algorithms, has anyone found a better approach?"
I mean, I just realized last year that in the basement I had six shoeboxes containing twenty-five years worth of cancelled checks, invoices and receipts.
I tried to go through them, but realized that I didn't really have any quick, easy, reliable way to decide which could be safely thrown out. Sure, 95% of them were easy. Most bills and cancelled checks only need to kept for long enough to resolve any mixups. But the rest were fairly hard.
Tax returns? I think the answer is supposed to be that you don't need to keep them after ten years.
And in the really old ones, I realized that I was fascinated by the changes in the look of bills, receipts, and checks. The oldest ones were printed in ink with chaintrain printers, for example. Then they started to become laser-printed--in monospaced type. Then they acquired proportionally-spaced type. Then they started to get laid out with little boxes and sidebars and things...
Up to about ten years ago I still got--what DO you call those anodized aluminum boxes they always used to have on the counters of small businesses, containing what I think were continuous-form carbon receipts that might have been about 6 by 8 inches in size, onto which bills/receipts/invoices were written by hand? The typefaces popular for letterheads, business cards, and so forth have changed considerably over the years.
But I digress. What algorithms and rules of thumb do people use for deciding what bills can be thrown out? Pardon me, of course I meant shredded.
(And please don't tell me to "just scan them..." then I need to fret about archival media and whether CD labels rot CD-R's and whether Blu-Ray DVD drives will be able to read CD-R's and how to assign them file names and... oh, my aching head)
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
it sounds like you have a good filing system already, but lack the discipline to stick to it. you'll probably find a large number of people who file by month, and a large number who file by account. I myself am sorta a both. I keep monthly bills by account, and keep store credit/debit card receipts by month.
pick a filing system you like and get yourself into the habit of sticking to it in January, and dont let teh papers keep piling up into june.
The One Rule Of Chess You'll Ever Need: Don't play someone who carries a kit in their bookbag.
"I file all of my bills in a circular metallic file..."
Although funny, this is not far from what I do. I have an 8 1/2 by 11 computer paper box under my desk. Paid bills go into this box in chronological order. When the box is full, I throw it into the closet and get a new box.
The only exceptions are tax-related items. There are so few of those, they don't even get their own box.
A.
(who used to keep things meticulously in folders, until he realized that no-one cared, including himself)
...bringing you cynical quips since 1998
I created a spreadsheet to solve this problem.
In the first column I have dates. In the next column the current bank account balance. In the next columns I have money in/out. This includes paychecks, mortgage, student loan payments, credit card payments and a column for other expenses.
Most of these dollars in/out columns is setup so that it checks the date in column A. In the case of a paycheck, it checks the day mod 14 (income every two weeks). In the case of the mortgage, it checks to see if the day of the month is the 6th and not a weekend, etc. Some checks are complicated like my water bill-- the due date is the Friday between the 3rd and 9th of each month. I also have to estimate certain payments ahead of time.
Then, all these columns are added together accross the same day and carried over to the next day's current account balance.
It works great. Whenever a check comes in, I just open the spreadsheet, look at everything coming due according to the spreadsheet, and payit. It even lets me see when I've got to carry money in my account over several pay periods to cover automatic widthdraws from my account for things like the mortgage payment.
When new bills come in, I just update my estimates in the spreadsheet or add the amount the other expenses column. When I have take money out of the account to pay for things like groceries, I use a debit card and update the spreadsheet when I get home.
Now you might ask how this solves the problem of getting rid of those paper bills. The key is to create one sheet of paper with all the information you need to handle electronic payments -- things like URL's, etc. When you get paid, go online with this sheet and pay everything you can electronically. I'm to the point now where I only have to write maybe one or two checks a month to pay for things. I keep one small stack of bills that go into this category. It's so small a stack, I don't bother with things like file folders.