How To Organize Household Paperwork

Organizing household paperwork sometimes seems to be a long and a tedious process to carry out. The paperwork can comprise of your utility bills, mails, invitations, applications, email printouts, leaflets, etc. You might have piled all the papers, both important and unimportant, at your place and are now finding it difficult to differentiate between the necessary documents and the ones that need to be disposed off. To clear the clutter, without much hassle, you need to work systematically. In this article, we have given some tips to help you know how to organize household paperwork.

Organizing Important Household Papers

If you do not have a home office, it is suggested to designate an area, probably a drawer or a cupboard, for filing the bills, important documents and other household paperwork.
Take a pile of the bills and receipts and sort them according to their types. After categorizing the bills, tuck them in a folder. The utility bills should be cleared from the folders periodically.
Go through the office files that you have dumped at your home. Separate the unwanted files from the important ones. This will reduce a lot of clutter, as files occupy a huge space in the cabinet. After sorting out the files, arrange them neatly into the cabinet, in a slanting vertical position. While doing this, make sure that you place the files of similar use, together.
Some of the files may not easily fit into a category. For such items, you need to assign a section in your cabinet called “miscellaneous files”. It will be easy for you to recognize them, as these will stand out from other documents that have been already categorized.
Get into each of the rooms and gather all the loose papers that have been placed here and there. After gathering all the loose papers, such as leaflets, coupons, receipts and e-mail printouts, put them in a shoebox.
A better way to record the address of your acquaintance and the important phone numbers is to use index cards. Unlike the address books, index cards take less space. They can be accommodated easily, in a file box. Make sure that you update the cards regularly.
Important household paperwork, like mortgage papers, tax records, investment records, stock certificates, insurance payments and medical records, should be arranged in separate folders, neatly tucked away in the cupboard.
Sometimes, you may miss out to send timely wishes for marriages, birthdays, Baptism ceremony, and the like. If you tuck away the invitations for such occasions neatly in a file and keep it in a visible place, you will tend to open it regularly. This way, you would not have to worry about missing out the important dates.

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