OK. That was a message brought to you by The Professional......dumdumdum.

Yeah....Maybe next he'll tell us how long to keep bank statements? How about utility bills from old addresses? ;)

The shredding has begun.

I tend to keep my bank statement for a tax year - really the only reason you need them is to verify that your bank is correctly debiting and crediting your account, so you could probably be safe with a shorter time frame if you are dilligent about balancing your check book.

On the other hand, sometime you will need them to demonstrate your income and cash flow - such as when purchasing property, usually 3 months history is sufficient, but if you have a more irregular pay cycle - i.e. you own your own business, then you will probably need to keep them much longer (three to six years would be the max).

Utility Bills again are only needed to verify payments recieved and charges acrued - if everything is fine, you don't need them. The utilities themselves are only required to keep the stubs 6 months. Depending on your State, there is a statute of limititations of 2 to 3 years to recover costs from erroneous billing, so that would be the maximum you'd need them. I keep mine for 3 months.

Cheers,

€, CRM

I've started a simple system. I have an accordian folde with 12 divisions, labled with each month. I just batch all our statements and bills by month (I do it by due-date). I started in April, so one next April rolls around, I'll just pull out the April '05 documents, get rid of them, and start anew. That way always have exactly one full year of records, and you don't have to go looking all over the place to find stuff that you can dump, it's all right there ready to be shreded.

Hmmm . . . interesting . . . that would leave all sorts of room in my new file cabinet (matches my swank Target desk) for other things I shouldn't be keeping.



(hehehe, I originally typed "bee keeping." Maybe I should put some honey in my tea?)