After a very busy day of running errands, baking, and church the children were finally in bed. Now comes the moment of truth. I have not done any organizing today. I want to sit on the couch and watch t.v., but I don't. I spent the last hour sorting receipts by month. Here is a picture of our box where we stick receipts and paperwork that need to be filed or dealt with:
After an hour I have not even put a tiny dent in this mess. I am sorting the receipts by month so we can check them against our bank account, make sure things are in order, and get rid of any that were not for large purchases. I am also planning to go through my grocery receipts to see how much money I have saved with coupons this year. I intended to keep track of this throughout the year, but that did not happen, and now it is already November. Here is the after picture of my progress:
I know. You really can't see much difference. I put each month's receipts in an envelope, and I am ashamed to say that there are 14 envelopes there. This project will clearly take many more hours of work, but even these tedious tasks must be accomplished at some point.
I know this has not been an interesting post, but the moral of this post is that if you take care of the tedious stuff as it comes (like receipts) you won't ever have to do this.
Please comment and tell me:
How do you deal with the receipts that come into your house? Do you keep them? If so, for how long?
I struggle with these questions about a lot of paperwork in our house.
We put everything on a rewards credit card and try to pay it off every 2 weeks. Easier to remember 2 weeks vs 4. We look at the charges and make sure that everything looks ok. Most receipts get shredded every month. If I know I need to keep one, I put it in an envelope in my binder of stuff. Our credit card self sorts all charges and tells you at the end of the year how much you spent in each category. You can export the end of the year file into any finance program to further sort and track finances. We don't get that far in the weeds though.
ReplyDeleteI have been thinking about getting a gift card for each of the stores I frequent most often and then getting rid of the receipts I don't need.
ReplyDeleteHonestly we don't keep anything. I may regret this later but just like you I found the process to be tedious and cluttered. So I decided that we wouldn't keep anything. We shred everything that has our names/address/account numbers etc. So far this has not come back to bite me. IF it is a big ticket item, I keep the receipt in my purse for several weeks until we see that we do not need it any longer.
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