Financial ~ Insurance ~ Personal ~ Home
The article recommends dividing the drawers into 4 color-coded sections as follows:
1. Financial (green) - for incoming or outgoing money such as banking, credit cards, investments, mortgage, taxes(current year only), utilities and estate planning.
2. Insurance/Vehicles (blue) - home owners, auto, life and health as well as files for maintenance and registration of vehicles
3. Personal (yellow) - Create one file for each family member and pet to organize items such as medical records, education, church sports, hobbies, etc.
4. Home (red) - use this final section to organize home maintenance, improvements or repairs as well as past and future home projects and home owners association.
How Long should you keep it? ..... Get the Better Homes and Garden handy guidelines at bhg.com/paper
So here is a picture of my attempt at the BH&G Color Coded Home Filing System ...... now if those papers can just find their way into their beautiful file!!!!
I took this a step further and decided to organize my tax returns as well since the BH&G article recommends only keeping the current year in your easy to access color coded system, I had to find something to do with the previous years. I store this container in the top of a closet since we do not access it often. I printed out labels with dates for each tax year as well as future tax years. Take a look.....
Another important note the BH&G article makes is to protect legal documents. These documents do not belong in your home filing system but rather in a safety deposit box or fire safe box.
I purchased a small Water and Fire Safe box at Walmart for around $30 to store birth certificates, passports and other important legal documents. Great investment for keeping important items safe and easy to grab in case of emergency.
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