Wednesday, July 04, 2012

Good for the soul

Like most people, we accumulate paperwork. Utility bills, bank statements, tax returns etc all get carefully filed away and never see the light of day again. Then we get to the point where the filing cabinet is full and it is impossible to jam any more paper into it. That is the time when we ask, “do we really need all this paper?”

There are some things that I like to keep, for example the documents about our houses and cars. It is fascinating to look back on those and see just how little we paid for things back in the 70s. The first house we bought cost us £7,500 which seemed like a fortune at the time. The first new car we had cost £1,500 – you could pay that just for a service on some cars these days.

Now we have a bin bag full of redundant paperwork to get rid of and yes, anything that includes account details has been shredded. There is room again in the filing cabinet and we have the satisfaction of knowing that we have gained some space and some order back to our lives.

Having cleared the filing cabinet, I really need to attack the shed and my “toy cupboard” – there must be quite a bit of gathered junk in those two spaces that would give us even more room.

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