Do you go paperless?

[RetireAge50]

What is paper? What is a PDF? I can see and review all balances and transactions whenever I want with my pocket computer (phone?).

 

[happy8]

With respect to my brokerage accounts (Schwab) , paperless except for end of year tax reports.

Once a year I:

-download pdf's of each monthly statement for each account for the previous year.
-create within the brokerage website and download an excel worksheet of "transactions" for each account for the previous year. This makes it easy for me to search for a particular transaction or to sum expenses. This data is only downloadable for 2 year period hence my yearly download.

 

[Nemo2]

Oops...thought this was yet another thread about RobbieB's bidets........don't get up, I'll see myself out.

 

[Katsmeow]

We are mostly paperless.

I do get a few bills in paper form, but honestly I could get rid of most of those. Some of those come in both paper/electronic form.

I do pay everything online that I possibly can. The paper that does come in almost always gets scanned, converted to searchable PDF and then uploaded to Evernote (some very confidential financial stuff is kept locally only). Once I have done that I discard (shred) the original document. The exception is mostly things within a return window where it may be easier to have the original receipt.

For bills received only I can usually get a PDF and I do that and keept it as well.

I used to have lots and lots of file folders. Now I have 3 drawers and I could probably consolidate it to 2 if I wanted to.

 

[VanWinkle]

Paperless here for all investing and monthly bills.

 

[PatrickA5]

Nearly paperless. I do print out the latest quarterly statement from Vanguard since 95% of our money is there. I started doing that after Clark Howard suggested keeping at least one recent statement of bank accounts just to prove that you have money in an account - I guess in case of a giant computer hack or something. Other than that, pretty much all paperless.

 

[Scuba]

We're paperless except for property taxes, car maintenance files, and EOB's from health insurance company. Although we are paperless with our credit card companies, I print and keep the statements. I don't generally keep receipts and sometimes I've needed to research a transaction and it's so much easier with the hard copy statements already printed.

 

[Danmar]

Having multiple homes makes it almost mandatory to go paperless. Almost nothing of importance received by mail. About the only thing is insurance premium requests, insurance companies are way behind banks on this. Maybe a couple of tax slips but almost all are available on line. It’s really amazing how the internet has changed our lives in a pretty short time.

 

[audreyh1]

Nearly paperless. I do print out the latest quarterly statement from Vanguard since 95% of our money is there. I started doing that after Clark Howard suggested keeping at least one recent statement of bank accounts just to prove that you have money in an account - I guess in case of a giant computer hack or something. Other than that, pretty much all paperless.

I have electronic copies (PDFs) of all our account statements with multiple backups. Never felt the need to print them though.

 

[BeachOrCity]

My biggest issue with making the switch is twofold:
1. For tax purposes you effectively need access to all bills and receipts documents for 8 years for audit purposes. Thats a long time. Recently nneeded very old bank statements that were long ago discarded. Bank could not provide some and the rest required fees.
2. All these ebills basically send you an email then you have to log in and print it out or save it. Seems like this step takes more time than opening smailmail and electronically or auto paying it?

I do of course use electronic and auto bill pay. Just not sure paperless really would save me time or really allow access to docs if I don’t manually save them.

 

[Scuba]

I can find electronic copies much faster than paper copies. I learned this at work and have now applied it at home too. YMMV

 

[donheff]

I am paperless for some stuff but I still get credit card statements in the mail as well as any routine accounts that change significantly on a monthly basis. I handle finances and bill paying but DW skims through all of the bills highlighting anything she questions. It is a good partnership.

 

[Red Badger]

Paperless, but very little auto-pay. Stopped a service years ago but auto pay kept rolling along. Clawing back my money was a hassle. Most on-line payments are from my checking account, so it's pretty much one stop shopping.

 

[JOHNNIE36]

I would love to go paperless, but resist in some cases. I know you have online access to all the detail of billing statements, but I am more comfortable holding a piece of paper and analyzing it. For one, I don't trust cable companies and have found in the past that they might throw in some movie or extra charge. When I challenged the cable bill and got some satisfaction, I make notes on that paper bill and stick it in my file. Old fashioned? Yes, but then I'm an "old fashioned" kind of guy.

Recently moved into a new community of about 3000 residents. We have our own post office, gangs of mail boxes by street name and house number. Inside there is a table to sort through your mail and there are large bins to discard junk mail. I go in about every other day and these recycle bins are always loaded. Just junk mail. I guess the cost of mailing all this helps support the USPS but sometimes I wonder. What a waste.

 

[CaptTom]

I'm a little surprised that some folks think they have to keep this or that on paper. Even if you only get a paper copy (repair bill for the car maybe?), you should be able to scan it in pretty easily if you have a multi-function printer (which are very cheap) or one of any number of cell phone apps that will "scan" a document using the phone's camera, auto-rotating and de-skewing it automatically.

Once you have the documents scanned in, it's far easier to organize them in a computer. You can make folders within folders and name both the files and folders in a way that's meaningful to you. There's no reason anything should ever be hard to find.

With remote access to my NAS (network attached storage) drive, I can get at my "home" files from anywhere. Just yesterday I was on a boat I sometimes work on, and needed the manual for a piece of equipment. I had it within seconds. But even if the Internet were unavailable, I have all the files I need on my home network, backed up to a remote location, and most of the important ones are on my laptop, too.

I've been picking away at my life-long collection of paper files, scanning in what I need and in some cases getting rid of things I don't. I have yet to find any reason to retain paper.

 

[Red Badger]

I would love to go paperless, but resist in some cases. I know you have online access to all the detail of billing statements, but I am more comfortable holding a piece of paper and analyzing it. For one, I don't trust cable companies and have found in the past that they might throw in some movie or extra charge. When I challenged the cable bill and got some satisfaction, I make notes on that paper bill and stick it in my file. Old fashioned? Yes, but then I'm an "old fashioned" kind of guy.

Recently moved into a new community of about 3000 residents. We have our own post office, gangs of mail boxes by street name and house number. Inside there is a table to sort through your mail and there are large bins to discard junk mail. I go in about every other day and these recycle bins are always loaded. Just junk mail. I guess the cost of mailing all this helps support the USPS but sometimes I wonder. What a waste.

I believe the USPS can be likened to the army maintaining divisions of cavalry on horseback. It's long outlived its purpose I would support mail service of 1-2 times per week at centralized points similar to above (where on stop delivers mail for hundreds of residences). In our area, the post office has already separated most package delivery into a dedicated service. Over 90% of our mail never makes it into the house - straight to recycle bin. The waste of resources and the additional pollution is a damn disgrace.

 

[scrabbler1]

I believe the USPS can be likened to the army maintaining divisions of cavalry on horseback. It's long outlived its purpose I would support mail service of 1-2 times per week at centralized points similar to above (where on stop delivers mail for hundreds of residences). In our area, the post office has already separated most package delivery into a dedicated service. Over 90% of our mail never makes it into the house - straight to recycle bin. The waste of resources and the additional pollution is a damn disgrace.

And it's not just the junk mail but all of the inserts and other fluff which get included in the bills. Ever notice how fat the envelopes are which include bills or statements? So much of it has nothing to do with the bill but instead is advertising and promotions. All of that goes into the trash, of course. But once in a while there is something informative in that junk such as a warning about a rate increase so when I toss that without reading it before the next bill has a rate increase, I often feel blindsided.

Can't seem to win if I toss the junk or try wading through it first.

 

[kcowan]

Completely paperless. The last to convert was income tax last year. I would say storing electronic records is more work than filing the paper, but it allows us to travel the world without regard to due dates. And once downloaded, the data is easily manageable.

 

[Chuckanut]

I have no problems with keeping electronic copies of bills, statements, etc.

I do have a problem with trusting some organization with keeping that information. There have been far to many breaches were bad guys have literally spent months snooping around a big corporation's computer systems before being detected. I don't want the proof that I actually bought my 5000 shares of Apple on October 19, 1987 at $36.50 to only be on their computers.

 

[Bestwifeever]

I'm all paperless. Print everything to pdf and scan anything that comes in on paper. Scanned all old documents and had a bonfire with the paper.

I'm quoting you as an example of the people who posted here about being paperless (which we are not). How do you have your finances set up so your spouse or someone else could easily take over bill paying?

I'm thinking maybe I should set up a separate email account for only bill paying so DH wouldn't have to wade through all my emails to find the bills and confirmations of payment (and as a paper person, he would just print them all out anyway )?

PS: companies should offer a $ incentive for paperless, and they would be amazed at how many people would switch.

 

[exnavynuke]

I much prefer paperless. Went to it as soon as practical on my accounts.

 

[ExFlyBoy5]

Everything that can be paperless, is. Our taxes have been very simple for a number of years, so there is no reason to keep a bunch of crap for 8+ years.

I have been helping my Dad go through some of his stuff (trying to de-clutter 90 years worth of stuff is quite the chore) and the amount of paper/statements he has kept is amazing. He can't recall a time when he has had to EVER go into the "archives" and that included owning a business for several years. He still has 9 shoe boxes of cancelled checks that he refuses to part with...it is somewhat frustrating.

I was thinking about it until earlier this year when our ISP went down for five days. When we have a utility that is maintained as a utility should be, I'll reconsider.

Since that condition is unlikely to be met within my lifetime the answer is a firm and unequivocal "NO!"

Well, the USPS is also a utility and isn't infallible. Ask the folks in Puerto Rico how long they went without mail. It was certainly longer than 5 days.

I'm quoting you as an example of the people who posted here about being paperless (which we are not). How do you have your finances set up so your spouse or someone else could easily take over bill paying?

Yes. Most everything is set up on auto pay, and the DW has access to all the information. Any transition required would be fairly seamless.

 

[exnavynuke]

I'm quoting you as an example of the people who posted here about being paperless (which we are not). How do you have your finances set up so your spouse or someone else could easily take over bill paying?

I'm thinking maybe I should set up a separate email account for only bill paying so DH wouldn't have to wade through all my emails to find the bills and confirmations of payment (and as a paper person, he would just print them all out anyway )?

PS: companies should offer a $ incentive for paperless, and they would be amazed at how many people would switch.

I have a piece of paper in my safe with my account login/password information for all websites that someone might need to access on my behalf in case I'm incapacitated or dead.

 

[kcowan]

Having multiple homes makes it almost mandatory to go paperless. Almost nothing of importance received by mail. About the only thing is insurance premium requests, insurance companies are way behind banks on this.

Yes we finally got insurance to move to electronic this year after badgering them for five years. First CNS and then O'Rourke. Still get hard copy but by the time it arrives, it has been paid.

One of the byproducts is that our inkjet printers always have dried up cartridges. Need to get some convenient printing service like FaxZero for luddites.

 

[Cobra9777]

The only important paper documents we still receive via mail are: CC statements, property tax bills, and EOBs from health insurance companies. I never download PDFs, scan, or print anything.

We auto-pay everything except the CCs and property tax. The bills are reviewed online or via email. I like to have DW validate the CC statements since she's the big spender, and it's easy to just hand her the paper statement. But I'm very close to moving those to push-pay or auto-pay, which would also go paperless. I keep meaning to move EOBs to paperless but just haven't gotten around to it yet.

Fidelity keeps 10 years of statements online. In addition to investment accounts, we do all banking there with a CMA. It's extremely rare that I need access to something from a few years ago, but I've never had any problem.

Along with our wills and other important papers, I keep a very detailed document of how all the routine finance stuff is handled so DW or someone else could easily carry on in the event of my death or incapacitation.

We do keep paper records of medical receipts as backup for future HSA withdrawals. That file is now pretty thick and growing. I've thought about scanning it, but haven't gotten around to that either.