Finance Blog
Money Management Tips: Storing Your Paperwork
No comments
My clients have survived the Malibu fires, the subsequent mudslides and floods, the Rodney King riots, and several earthquakes—and that’s just here in California. Others have experienced Hurricane Katrina and other equally devastating storms and floods. Why start out a blog about organizing paperwork by…
My clients have survived the Malibu fires, the subsequent mudslides and floods, the Rodney King riots, and several earthquakes—and that’s just here in California. Others have experienced Hurricane Katrina and other equally devastating storms and floods.
Why start out a blog about organizing paperwork by telling you about disasters? Because we spent months trying to reconstruct records and fight audits without adequate records as a result of these disasters.
These documentation nightmares could easily be avoided today by moving to the cloud. With these paperwork and money management tips, you can take your records out of your hands and out of your home—and out into the world of bits, bytes, and gigabytes.
Do it yourself
It’s inevitable that you will lose things that are precious when living in flood plains, near earthquake faults, or in the frequent path of big winds. Not just tax documents, financial records, and wills, but also family histories, irreplaceable photographs and videos, artwork, books and articles you may have written, and special papers. However, for the first time in the history of the world, everything can be scanned, recorded, and saved forever—inexpensively.
Watch for sales of all-in-one scanner-printer-fax-copy machines. Read Consumer Reports or CNet to research which system is best for your household and/or business needs. And definitely look for the sales.
Software can be helpful as well. Both Quicken and QuickBooks let you import receipts directly into the check registers so you have copies with your accounting records. Other programs may allow you to do this as well.
Let others do it for you
The IRS requires that you keep receipts for all your business expenses to back up credit card or bank statements. You know how irritating it is keeping that mess of paperwork in order.
If you don’t have the time or patience to do it yourself, send your documents to a service like Shoeboxed.com. You may think you’re saving money by doing it yourself, but these online services have technology you may find valuable. They can organize personal or business records in ways that will allow you to access them most easily—even via your phone or other mobile device. You can even use your phone to transmit new receipts as you go through your day. This is especially useful when you pay cash and keep losing those receipts.
What about your purchases with warranties? You need the original receipt, along with the warranty paperwork, if anything goes wrong. Scanning it and keeping it safely online can be an excellent way to keep the clutter down and yet have the proofs of purchase at your fingertips when you need them.
Safety and future access
The most important thing when using the cloud is to store your data with services that:
- Will be there in the long run.
- Take strong security precautions.
- Give you formats that you will still be able to read three years, five years, or even 20 years from now.
- Are NOT free. You have no control if you don’t own/rent the space.
Incidentally, it’s a good idea to keep a copy of your tax returns on paper as well. After all, even 10 years of tax returns don’t take up more space than two reams of paper. Just in case there’s a cloudburst…
READ MORE:
Making Sure You Get the Adoption Tax Credit
Filing Taxes: Seven Reasons to Adjust Your Withholding
Paying Taxes: How Is Your Vice Taxed?
Saving Money: Could You Benefit from the Savers Tax Credit?
Tax Tips and Tax Consequences of Failed Businesses
Eva Rosenberg, EA is the publisher of TaxMama.com , where your tax questions are answered. Eva is the author of several books and ebooks, including the new edition of Small Business Taxes Made Easy. Eva teaches a tax pro course at IRSExams.com and tax courses you might enjoy at http://www.cpelink.com/teamtaxmama.
No comments yet
We welcome your interest and participation on this forum, but be aware that comments will be published at Equifax's sole discretion. Please don't use this blog to submit questions or concerns about your Equifax credit report or raise customer service issues. Instead, you should contact Equifax directly for all such matters and any attempts to do so in this forum will be promptly re-directed.
Some other factors to consider when commenting:
- Registration and privacy. While no registration is required to visit our forum, participants wishing to post a message must register by creating an account. All personal information provided by forum members incident to registration is governed by our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.
- All comments are anonymous. We'll delete your name, e-mail address, and any other identifying information, including details about your investments.
- We can't post or respond to every comment - As much as we'd like to, we can't post every comment, nor can we guarantee that we will respond to each individual message. All questions or comments about your Equifax credit report or similar customer service issues should be handled by contacting Equifax directly.
- Don't offer specific legal, tax or financial advice. All of the materials on this Site are for information, education, and noncommercial purposes only and this forum is not intended as a means of expressing views or ideas regarding any specific legal, tax, or investment advice. While offering general rules of thumb is both permitted and encouraged, recommending specific ideas or strategies regarding investments, taxes, and related matters is prohibited.
- Credit Repair. This blog is not intended as a venue for the discussion or exchange of ideas regarding credit repair or other strategies intended to assist visitors and community members improve or otherwise modify their credit histories, ratings or scores.
- Stay on topic. Your comment should be concise and pertain to the specific post in question.
- Be respectful of the community. The use of profanity, offensive language, spam, and personal attacks will not be tolerated and egregious or repeat offenders will be banned from future participation. We encourage disagreement and healthy debate, but please refrain from personal attacks on our WordPresss and contributors.
- Finally: Participation in this forum may be terminated by Equifax immediately and without notice for failure to comply with any guidelines or Terms of Use. As such, you should familiarize yourself with all pertinent requirements prior to submitting any response through the blog or otherwise. All opinions expressed in this forum are solely those of the individual submitting the comment, and don't necessarily represent the views of Equifax or its management.
Equifax maintains this interactive forum for education and information purposes in order to allow individuals to share their relevant knowledge and opinions with other members and visitors. We encourage you to participate in discussions about personal finance issues and other topics of interest to this community, but please read our commenting guidelines first. Equifax reserves the right to monitor postings to the forum and comments will be published at our discretion. Do you have questions or comments about your Equifax credit report or customer-service issues regarding an Equifax product? If so, please contact Equifax directly. All opinions and information expressed or shared in blog comments are solely those of the person submitting the comments, and don't necessarily represent the views of Equifax or its management.
RSS Feeds