The Great January Paperwork Cleanout

I took advantage of all of our snow days in January to do my yearly "January paperwork purge" (even though I'm just getting to posting it now).  Here is my post about it last year. 

I took loads of papers out of our file cabinet, and made a big shred pile.

Handy Boy did some of the shredding.  He thought it was fun, until the pile kept getting bigger and bigger...It took several shredding sessions over about four days to finish.  I had to take over and shred a few times.   

Good Aurora brand shredder from Staples that doesn't overheat! 

This isn't much of a "before and after," since I do this every year, but here's the "before."  Some of the folders were getting pretty stuffed. 

After.  Again, not a huge difference, but look at all the room I freed up. Wheeeee!  I even keep some extra file folders in the back of the drawer.

I use blue hanging folders for main categories, and manila folders for sub categories.    Some examples of our main categories are:

• Cable
• Electric
• Health - Laurie
• Health - Rob
• Health - Handy Boy
• Mortgage

Here is a good article from MSN Money about which papers to keep, and which ones you can ditch from your bulging file drawers.  I strive to keep our paperwork limited to this ONE file drawer.  

I will say that we have one file crate in the basement with paperwork from my old home party business.  I still have to keep some of that for a while.  However, I refuse to outgrow the file drawer for our normal paperwork.

Does anyone need to do some shredding?  Did you already go through some paperwork?  I've seen around blogland that this is a pretty popular project to tackle this time of year. 

Linking to: I'm an Organizing Junkie/ I Heart Naptime/ Fingerprints on the Fridge/ A Little Knick Knack/ Tidy Mom/ House of Hepworths/ Organize with Sandy/ Paisley Passions/ Tales from Bloggeritaville/ We are That Family/ Sew Much Ado