Thursday, June 9, 2011

Can you please just email me a copy?

Ah, home sweet home.  It has been a great week, and I've meant to blog, but you know how it gets.

First, I want to congratulate Sara from Wife-Mommy-Woman and her family on their newest baby boy!  I'll let her announce his arrival on her own blog, but I just wanted to say how excited I am for her and the whole family, having gotten to 'watch' the pregnancy on FB and blog.  Congratulations!

Becky at Small Bits is hosting this week's Round Up on a very important FS topic - paperwork!  This is one I could write volumes on, but I'm thankfully not surrounded by the mountains of paperwork I need to go through in my apartment (just the mini-mountains of catalogs and junk mail here), so I am less than inspired.  However, the title of this post pretty much sums up every encounter I have with anyone these days.  When someone helpfully offers to mail/fax/print me a hard copy of something, I cringe and ask if they can do it digitally. 

It's true that paperwork tends to pile up on you in the FS, especially the first year.  A-100 must surely stand for "A 100 inch-high pile of paperwork will be the most tangible result of the next five weeks."  Add to this the need to go through all the paperwork you've accumulated thus far in your life, and it's a daunting amount to deal with.  I am trying desperately to cut down on hard copies of things and had several quite ruthless bouts with a shredder last year.  I bought a scanner/copier/printer combo, which has made life much easier - especially being able to scan hundreds of pages of medical records and the like.  Then I can put the originals in safe storage and keep a couple secure digital copies spread around. 

I am really bad in that I don't deal with paperwork as it piles up.  Instead I pile and pile and pile until it a) falls over or b) attacks me in some way.  Then I put on the television, cozy up on the floor with my X feet-high pile, and start sorting.  It's amazing what you find.  Expired coupons, cards and letters, important insurance documents, papers you've been looking for forever, etc.

The greatest find ever was an un-cashed paycheck for $1,000.  I was so incredibly excited and over the moon but confused over how I'd missed it before.  It was a day or so before I found the matching re-issued check; the first one had gotten lost in the mail, so I'd had my employer re-issue the check.  I never remembered to open/void the first one when it finally came.  Oops.  (This was from a time when I was working about five jobs and traveling a lot, so some things fell by the wayside.)

Right now I have about four or five rubbermaid totes full of paperwork dating back to high school, college, and grad school that I need to go through.  I shipped them with my HHE with the hopes of having an entire room for sorting and shredding.  Of course I ended up with a smaller-than-Oakwood apartment, and they're stacked high in my box room (the tiny second bedroom that is unusable because it's stacked floor-to-ceiling with HHE boxes or piles that won't fit elsewhere because I was under the impression I'd have a human-sized apartment and shipped a generous amount of HHE hoping to sort and shred and give away).  Okay, rant over.  The good news is, once I finally do go through them (which ought to be lots of fun with the kittens!), it'll cut down significantly on my HHE weight to my next post!

I don't have a lot of advice to offer in the FS paperwork genre, but it definitely consumes a lot of time and energy for all of us.  I look forward to reading some other posts to get creative ideas.  Looking through some of Becky's recent pack-out-preparation posts has already been really helpful!

All right, that's a fairly boring post, but it is topical.  Be glad there are no pictures.  I am going to write a quick catch-up post now about the last week. 

5 comments:

Becky said...

I loved this post! You are awesome. I can't wait to hear about how your vacation has been going.

You have been included in the Weekly State Department Blog Round Up here:
http://smallbitsfs.blogspot.com/2011/06/round-up.html

If you'd prefer not to be included please let me know.

Anonymous said...

I have a suggestion for cutting down on the junk mail and catalogs. Try signing up with catalogchoice.org. It works really well. I'm always mentioning it to people--just think how much money the State Dept. wastes sending all those stupid catalogs around the world to pile up in post mailrooms!

Sara said...

Awww...thanks! I'm still trying to put together a blog post, but it's been difficult.

Heather said...

Hm...maybe I will find hidden money in some piles of paperwork! I love hearing about how other people do things...this whole round-up has been eye-opening!

Sadie said...

Thanks ladies! Becky - great job on the RoundUp! Kelly - thanks for the tip; I used a similar service earlier this year that helped with a lot of the bulk, but I'll try this one too! Sara - you're entitled to take plenty of time! (but I see you just put up a post anyway.) Heather - good luck with the treasure hunt!