Life has been full of adventures and very busy for the past three weeks, keeping me away from my home office quite a bit!  I’m looking forward to returning to my routine and to regular blogging this week.  A special thanks to Debbie Dragon, today’s guest blogger, for sharing her wisdom!

Get Your Paperwork Organized

Paperwork at home can get out of control fairly easily.  If you consider the school papers your children bring home, the incoming mail including your credit card statements, utility bills, and other fun household documents, it’s no wonder many of us have papers randomly stashed in drawers all over the house.

Organizing your paperwork seems overwhelming amidst all of your other daily tasks, but it’s one of those things that if you just take the time to set it up right in the beginning, you can easily maintain it with very little effort or time.  It’s well worth it- and you may never be late on a misplaced credit card bill again!  One popular method of organizing your household paperwork is to use three-ring binders.  They’re inexpensive, and help keep things in order.

Step One: Put all of your paperwork into a pile.  Go through the house and gather all the mail that has been stuck in various places to “file” later; receipts, children’s school related or activity related paperwork, menus, user manuals, directions, contracts, and whatever else you have to keep.  When you think you have all of your paperwork in one place, quickly sort it into categories (“children”, “home maintenance”, “hobbies”, “bills”, etc)

If you have a home of active children, it may be necessary for each child to have their own three-ring binder.  As you’ve made your piles of categorized paperwork, you’ll be able to see how many binders you’ll need.  You may be able to create a single binder for “household” paperwork, to contain appliance maintenance schedules, filter replacements, planned improvements, exterior maintenance; another for bills and credit card statements, utility statements and a schedule of due dates, another for each of the children, etc. 

Other ideas for binder organizational systems:

• menu planning, nutritional records

• hobby information, articles, topics you find interesting

• home reference materials, like how to manuals, product receipts, warranties, etc

• phone and address lists, internet log-in’s and passwords, goals and deadlines, records of expenses

• home based business records

Step Two: Divide each binder into subcategories.  In the children’s binders, you can use three ring binder dividers (inexpensive to purchase, or simply 3-hole punch colored cardstock and label it) to separate activities, school schedules, and other information pertaining to each child.

For binders that may contain receipts or small slips of paper, you can get the dividers that contain pocket folders as well, and simply slide them into the appropriate binder and category.  For documents that you need to keep for a long time, or things you don’t want to put holes in, keep a supply of translucent page protectors on hand so you can slide the paper inside them to view once placed inside the binder.

Step Three: Stick to it.  Once you’ve set up your various binders, the hard part is done.  All you need to do to make this paperwork organizational system work for you is maintain your hard work!  When you get the mail, go directly from your mailbox to your binders and file the documents where they belong.  Promptly trash anything you don’t need.  Whenever you refer to information in one of the binders, be sure to replace the paperwork when finished.

For a small investment of money (binders and supplies) and a reasonable time investment, the returns are tenfold.  You’ll know at a glance when your credit card bills and other bills are due; know whether Johnny has soccer or baseball on Wednesday or Jenny has ballet or piano lessons; and best of all- you’ll always have a place to keep the important paperwork around the house.

Debbie Dragon is a work-at-home mom of two boys and a full time freelance writer.  She provides content and articles for Creditorweb.com; where she writes about credit cards, rewards programs, and personal finance topics.