ForumGarden

You can be amazed by just how much "sensitive paper" you can accumulate over the years (around 18 years) when you save receipts, canceled checks, bills, and any other documents that contain your personal information. I started to shred a small bag worth of paper, weighing about 10 pounds, and it took me well over an hour and a half, with my shredder shutting down halfway through after it overheated.

Anyway, I still had another 11 bags each weighing around 10 pounds, to shred. So I looked on line and found Shred-It company, that would shred my sensitive material, "in front of me", to witness it destroyed. So I took it (110 pounds) to them, and I was amazed, as they had a truck with a monster shredder (similar to a wood chipper principle) in it that had the whole 110 pounds poured into the hopper, and it took a whole "1" minute to shred it all !!! Absolutely amazing!

Every couple of years or so I bundle them up and make a journey to the near-by forest, dig a hole, toss it all in, and light it up. Done. No strips of paper for babushka'd Persian woman to stick back together as documented proof of the crime as they did in Tehran during the occupation of the U.S. embassy. Without them, no one would have ever heard of Operation TP Ajax.

I feel your pain. Accumulated paper is the big problem of my life & home. It's a mess.

The best answer is to put it into the Recycle Bins. It is, after all, the most recyclable of all materials.

I'm campaigning to have Generic Marketing Mail banned, as not only is that a gross invasion of privacy, but a horrendous waste of paper (Sign My Petition).

Probably even worse are the floods of Take-Away leaflets that are routinely stuffed through the letterbox, regardless of notices on the door telling them not to.

I'm self-employed and my one-person business is a corporation, so I have to keep records on a whole lot of things for as long as the IRS requires. Then there are the personal paperwork. This was a big problem when I spent my year out roaming North America without a fixed home. The IRS tends to audit people like me rather often, so it was important that I have the info. I asked a tax attorney for advice (it's tax deductible). Here's what I do.

I have a good scanner. If there is something I need to save, I scan it and put it in the appropriate folder on my computer. I make backups of the entire folder structure for records onto an SD card. It is about the size of a postage stamp. I can fit an insane amount of data on a 64GB SD card. When I was out on the road full-time, I would snailmail a copy to a trusted friend and a copy to my PO box. You can get documents securely shredded just about anywhere in the country. Now that I spend half the time in my new home, I put a copy of the SD card in my safe deposit box at the bank.

I also run a program each year that checks the date of each scanned file in my records folder structure and tells me which files I can safely and legally delete.

The other thing that I did was switch any account that I could to electronic notification. This way I can get the records any time without the paper buildup. It has made life a lot easier for the postman.