Generally speaking, you can divide your paperwork up as follows:
· Papers to keep for one year max: Bank deposit slips, credit card receipts and ATM slips need only be kept until you’ve reconciled your accounts. Insurance and investment statements can be kept until you have fresh ones. When you discard documents, shred them to avoid identity theft.
· Papers to keep for longer than a year: statements on loans should be kept until the loan is paid off. For big loans, this can be quite a long time. Car papers have to be kept until you sell the car, and proof of investment purchases should be kept until investments are sold.
· Papers to keep for five years: Keep your tax records for five years to be on the safe side.
· Papers you should never throw away: Birth certificates, death certificates, divorce decrees, your copy of your will, life insurance details and other insurance policies are among the papers you will keep indefinitely.
Where to keep it all
Just as a backup, it’s a good idea to scan all important tax-related documents including proof of income and tax deductible expenses and keep them stored in the cloud. But to be absolutely safe, you also need to store the hard copies.
Over the years, these documents mount up, turning your house into a paper-packed ‘office’. Shelves drawers and cupboard space fill up with papers that you might just need one day, creating clutter as you struggle to find space to store things you use more frequently.
Even offices can get so clogged with paper that finding places to store them all become a problem. You end up with a “clutter room” packed with boxes and boxes of old files.
It’s very tempting throw all those old files away, but what if you have to prove you didn’t play fast and loose with the tax man?
Archive EOFY information safely for next to nothing
To help you solve the knotty problem of document storage, Storage King has designed a handy archive box that lets you store your documents neatly in an organised way. And since Storage King lets you store small as well as large volumes of things you don’t need all the time, it won’t cost much if we tuck them away for you.
Storage is secure as well as being weatherproof, so your original documents and the information they contain are perfectly safe. Organise documents according to date and according to how long they need to be kept so that you can thin down the accumulation of documents you won’t be needing again.
With storage locations all over Australia, you’re sure to find a convenient branch of Storage King to keep your EOFY papers safely in a place where they can’t get in your way.