2016 New Year’s Resolution: Deal With Paper Daily
January 04, 2016What’s my financial New Year’s Resolution for 2016? It’s all about dealing with paper. Much of daily life really does come with an instruction book, helpfully printed in four languages. Plus it comes with legal disclosures, bills, prospectuses, receipts, health insurance notifications, magazines and professional journals.
The more investments you own, the more potential for paper clutter. Shop online or give to charity? The number of catalogs and direct mail solicitations increases exponentially each month. Add children to the mix, and the tsunami of paper that arrives home daily from school threatens to bury the house.
I’ve always had a wary relationship with paper. I find it’s very easy for me to let paper get out of control, so I have to keep on top of things daily. When paper arrives at the Meyer household, either via postal service or backpack, it gets immediately sorted and recycled if possible.
However, some things inevitably require follow up. I am a busy, working mother of school-age children, and I can’t always deal immediately with actions required by a piece of mail or school form. Thus, I make neat piles of paper that I need to deal with later – file, pay, read, etc.
If I leave it on the kitchen counter for a few days, I’ll pay what needs to be paid, but everything else just stays in the pile “for later.” Then I’m annoyed with the pile since I like a very tidy house with clean surfaces, so I move the pile out of sight, usually on the stairs leading up to my home office, with the idea that I’ll file the papers later. I’ve been really busy lately helping with the launch of our CEO’s new book, so my lack of attention to the unsorted piles means I’ve got quite a job ahead of me to work through them.
It’s a new year, so time for a new start. I always make New Year’s resolutions, but they are usually about the kind of person I want to be, not specific actions to take. This year, one of my resolutions is more practical. I hereby resolve that in 2016 I will Deal with Paper Daily. Would you like to join me in making this resolution? Here’s what that looks like:
Make time to deal with paper daily. There’s no magic wand I can wave. I have to put in some time. Since I don’t like having piles on my kitchen counter or my office stairs, I plan to set aside 15 minutes at the end of the workday to deal with paper.
For this to work for me, it has to become a daily habit, like putting the dishes in the dishwasher. Otherwise, I’d be likely to skip it. 15 minutes a day is enough time to file paperwork I need to keep, pay a random bill that can’t be automated, submit a health insurance claim or deal with a school form.
Automate even more. Nearly all of our bills and investment accounts are already fully automated, yet the blizzard of paper arriving daily is still heavy. I’m sure if I look through all my benefits information, I’d find some ways to cut down on the paper via electronic delivery, especially with my HSA and health insurance. An hour of organization time online could save me the regular exasperation I feel when I get 10 pages of paper to document a $25 HSA expenditure.
Create a visual system. For me, out of sight is often out of mind. If I can see it, I am more likely to do it when it needs to be done. That’s why I’m so drawn to spreading things out on my kitchen counter, writing office to-do lists on a large chalkboard, and color coding my Outlook calendar.
We’ve already got a system that works very well for financial paperwork, including paying bills online, a master tax document folder, secure space for important documents and a dedicated filing space for our rental properties. It’s all the other paper that is tripping me up. Since what I am doing isn’t working very well so far, I am planning to ask some friends for suggestions and experiment with different ideas.
Get off mailing lists. To reduce the number of catalogs and commercial solicitations you receive, visit https://www.dmachoice.org/ to opt out of receiving unsolicited commercial mail for up to five years. The last time I did this was in 2010, so that explains why we’ve been getting about ten catalogs every day recently. It’s time to do it again. You can also opt out of pre-screened credit card and insurance solicitations by visiting www.optoutprescreen.com or calling 1-888-5-OPT-OUT (1-888-567-8688).
Getting off charitable direct mail lists is a lot harder. Charities often rent their lists to other groups to solicit their donors. This drives me bananas.
I don’t mind the email solicitations, but I don’t want the expensive paper ones, not even from organizations I support. According to the Better Business Bureau, one way to cut down on unwelcome charitable solicitations is to respond to the organization directly using the response card, asking them to take you off their list. Unfortunately, this doesn’t always work, so you may want to just recycle solicitations as soon as they arrive.
Donate. As much as I benefit from reading Bloomberg Businessweek when it arrives, do I really need to keep them all when I’m finished? Although I read all newspapers and most magazines online, I have a few subscriptions that were part of professional association memberships. I plan to keep the professional journals and use this list of ideas of where to donate the rest.
Is dealing with paper clutter on your 2016 New Year’s resolutions list? Let me know what is working for you! You can email me at [email protected] or tweet me @cynthiameyer_FF.