Ditch Paper Records, Go Electronic

How long should you keep certain records? That depends on who you ask! If you may have potentially made a mistake on your tax return, you will want to keep the records for 6 years. If you file a fraudulent tax return, you’ll want to keep the records indefinitely. Banks recommend you keep records for six years, credit cards recommend a few months, ultimately the bottom line is that all these records need to be saved and need to be saved for a period longer than one month.

So rather than keeping them in paper form, where they can be lost, damaged, or destroyed, why not keep an encrypted electronic copy on your computer? Electronic records take up no space and are easily reproducible (you can make multiple copies and keep them in different places). Secondly, you can always encrypt and lock your files so that they can’t be accessed by third parties without your permission. It’s much harder to lock up paper documents and much more expensive.

So consider scanning in your paperwork so that you don’t have to keep pesky paper versions around!

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