Ugh...Tossing 20-Plus Years of Old Receipts and Tax Records

I have been spending the past three days going through six or seven boxes of old tax records and old receipts for shredding.

Why, o why haven't we kept up with this task? It would have been so easy to do this as a yearly task, for example, tossing tax year 1998 in 2005.

Did we really need old receipts and tax records from 1998?

Of course not. However, the attic had been so full that nearly everything behind the first rows were not accessible.

And old receipts and tax stuff had been buried deep.

Finally, I was able to find these old records and papers.

So there's good news from Hoarderville: while the attic is still messy and full, everything is now located according to type and easily accessible for future culling and inventorying.

I have been at this job since October 2011, so I wonder how these hoarding TV shows can clear out an entire house in three days. Perhaps it's because I'm a lone person without a team of enthusiastic tossers.

In any case, I'm not sure I would want a "team" helping me--there is a psychological component to weeding and inventorying that needs to be recognized and honored.

For example, you would not think that tossing bills would bring back memories, but it does: we were so young and poor back in those early days of marriage, and I cannot tell you how many overdraft and dunning notices I found, particularly in the first two years of our marriage, when my better half was taking care of the bills (or not taking care of them). That was a painful time for us, a helplessness caused by a lack of sufficient funds and being seriously in hock to Visa, Mastercard, and Discover, our mean surrogate fiduciary parents.

Once I took over the bill paying, our financial situation changed for the better, but, unfortunately, I tend to be paranoid about what to save and tend to save everything.

I need to rethink that model.

Slowly, our financial situation improved (tremendously--we owe no one and have money in the bank), but it took setting aside money for various purposes (paying off existing debt, saving for the future, setting up a car fund, vacation fund, etc.) and sticking to that plan. I also paid ahead on our mortgage, at first, only a few dollars a month but eventually up to few hundred.

We paid off our 30-year mortgage in 17 years. It helps that better half has a good job with good raises. So I recognize that this exact plan might not work for everyone, but, with discipline, living within one's means is attainable.

Enough, already, with the financial planning lecture.

Our next task:

Old suitcases, which, in our house, seem to reproduce like cockroaches, some of which I will use for storage of my old dolls.