Kevin's Weblog

47) No Monthly Checks (all bills auto-paid)

At this point, I have all of our monthly or bimonthly bills being paid automatically out of the credit card or bank account, except for our rent and the trash bill. I’ve never heard of an independent landlord being set up to take direct bank payments, so that one will probably have to wait until we buy a house and have the mortgage payments deducted directly from the bank account.

As for the trash bill, we might have to move for that one too. Portland has this bizarre trash system where there are 30 or so companies contracted to pickup various sections of the city. If you do the math, that works out to about 5000 households per company. So, these guys are seriously small operations. Ours seems particularly rinky-dink. They don’t even send bills in envelopes; instead, I get a postcard with my bill. If the bill has more line items than fit on one postcard, they send a second postcard. I am not making this up. So, auto-billing seems like a lot to ask.

67) Organize old financial records: throw out unneeded stuff, create a system for archiving the remains.

Yesterday, I shredded most of 2001-2004.

Or, rather, I shredded most of my financial records from those years. It was fairly cathartic, although my shredder may disagree. I think it was a little overwhelmed by it all — I filled the bin 8 times within a couple hours.

I got rid of: auto loan statements, statements from unused bank accounts, credit card statements, utility bills, paystubs (except final one of each year), receipts for anything not under warranty and not tax related, frequent flier statements

I kept: auto service records (for cars I still own), proof of auto insurance, anything tax related (including car registration, education expenses, medical expenses), loan payoff letters, end-of-year credit card summaries, annual credit reports, records of credit disputes. I also kept the bank statements from my primary bank, and all my brokerage statements. Arguably, I could pare those down as well, although it’s surprising how often I end up digging through brokerage statements which are years old.

Next step: Now that my yearly accordian files are pathetically empty, I need to switch to another format for archiving the stuff I’m keeping.