Now that you have almost got to the end stage of the 31 Day Challenge to financial excellence and have hopefully made huge progress on various areas of your financial life, one of the worst things is to have your finances all in order and then not being able to find important financial documents when you need them, such as insurance policies, warranties, bank statements or income stubs for your tax return.
Having a proper, up-to-date and easy to understand filing system, does not only guarantee less stress and time lost when you are looking for things, it also ensures you do not waste money for example on a new product if your old one still has a guarantee on it. It allows you to quickly check you still have the right insurance, update your assets, debts and cash flow and makes is easy to check your credit card statements are all correct.
Today’s challenge is to upgrade your administration and decide whether you either want to keep a physical or digital administration. If you’d rather keep your documents saved in digital format, you’ll probably need some type of scanner to transfer any papers to digital.
After you’ve gone through your entire house to collect any papers that have been misplaced or temporarily stored in shoeboxes or drawers, start filing away your documents into folders organized in a logical way and with enough space. Example categories include:
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- Income / payslips and annual statements;
- Insurance policies;
- Bank and credit card statements;
- Savings and pensions overviews;
- Car documents;
- Utilities contracts and bills (electricity, water, phone etc).;
- Tax returns;
- Warranties, manuals and receipts;
- House and home maintenance related issues;
- Official paperwork such as birth certificates, marriage licence and diplomas;
- School documents;
- Mortgage and property documents;
- Medical documents;
- Documents regarding your pets
Throw away any documents you come across that you no longer need. From now on make sure to upkeep your administration on a daily basis. When done, let us all know on Facebook or any other social medium with #31DayChallengeToFE.
More tips and ideas on organizing your administration can be found in Step 66: Organize your Paperwork and Step 67: Digitize your Documents.
100 Steps Mission 