I found this site and really liked how the files are set up. My favorite part is the 24 month rotating catchall files. You will need 24 files labeled with the months of the year. You will end up with 2 files for each month, one of which will be labled "even year" and the other "odd year".
January-even year
January-odd year
February-even year
February-odd year
This is the place where you put all of your receipts, paid bills, account statements and any other paperwork you might need but that does not have a permanent filing home. Since we are in February 2010 I am putting all of the documents I'm getting this month in that file. When February 2012 (the next even year) comes around I will go through this file and shred most of the paperwork in this file. Anything that I still need to keep will get filed in a more permanent place. And then I will reuse my February-even year file for my February 2012 paperwork.
I love this system for several reasons. The two biggies are that I feel like I have to save everything and this gives me a place to do that. The second is it's so simple to file since over 90% of my paperwork ends up in these files. I figure that in 2 years I will have a pretty good idea what needs to make it into my personal files and I should be able to shred the rest pretty easily.
This is what I made all the cute file folders for. I have all of them sitting on top of my kitchen counter in a basket that used to be a magazine rack. You can see it here in one of my "before" pictures.
As new paperwork comes into the house it is getting filed quickly and painlessly into these folders and I'm starting to make some progress on my old stack of paperwork that needed to be filed too. My system still has a ways to go, but I love seeing progress. Only 17 days left in Filing February.
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