One important thing that you’ll want to take some time to really reflect on is: what organizational system works for you to keep all of your financial documents organized?

As a type A, OCD kinda person, with a former professional organizer as my mother, I know a thing or two about organizing things. I used to rearrange the furniture in my room because I thought it was fun. Instead of playing with my Barbies, I would just stage the furniture in their home.

There are 3 main organizational systems that work for financial documents:

1. A binder system - visual and convenient, it also forces you to keep your files from expanding, unless you want to keep buying more binders.
2. Files and a filing cabinet - also visual, but you must be consistent in your labeling to ensure that your filing system works well
3. Scan and file - ah, ok - I am technically a millennial, so I like the idea of scanning documents. The beauty of the scanning system is that you can store and find information quickly, while getting rid of all the papers you have! A win-win!

I’m a big proponent of the scanning method. I haven’t adopted it at home, but we use it at True North, and it makes it so easy to find documents. The other thing I love about scanning is that it allows you to purge and shred the originals, so you don’t have to keep storing so much paper.

Just make sure that if you save your important files to your computer that you password protect your computer and take the necessary security measures to ensure those documents remain safe. Also, be sure to backup your files, which you can do with a secure cloud storage system. That way, if your computer is irreparably damaged, you won’t lose all of your records.

That’s it for today. Tomorrow, we’re going to recap the week and I’m going to give you a little preview of next week’s theme.

My name is Ashley Micciche and this is the One Minute Retirement Tip.

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