Paper just accumulates. I can’t explain it. A lot of it comes into our homes every day in the mail and if we don’t have a system for handling it, it can quickly start to pile up. Suddenly a few pieces of mail have become fifty pieces of mail, then more.
Most of it is not important, but we have to sort through it all to find the things that are. This takes time, of course, and it tends to take a backseat to all the chores that hit us when we get home from work -- getting dinner together, walking the dog, maybe a quick trip to get groceries.
Many of our clients have had massive amounts of paper to deal with. We see a lot of junk mail, which is pretty easy to throw away, but we also see a lot of papers with sensitive information that needs to be shredded. The real issue is that there is usually, deep inside each file cabinet or each pile of paper, something with information that needs to be kept. This means somebody (often our staff) has to sort through all the files and papers to uncover the things that are needed. Then the rest can be shredded or discarded.
Maria
Maria’s brother, Jack, hired us to move her from her Brooklyn apartment to a residence near him in Maryland. The apartment was the same one they had grown up in. Jack left home to join the army when he was a young man, but Maria stayed and lived with her parents until both of them died many years later.
She was a solitary person. She had friends from church, but none of them were close enough to have been invited to her home. When we started working with her, she told us that nobody else had been inside – other than the building super – in twenty years.
She had kept people out because she was embarrassed for anyone to see how much paper she had accumulated. It started with her parents, eighty years earlier. Her father was evidently a “pack rat” and neither he nor her mother ever managed to come up with a good system for disposing papers they didn’t need. They just kept it all and boxed it up over the years. Maria inherited these papers and well as these habits and eventually the second and third bedrooms became nothing more than storage for papers and files.
Maria was paralyzed by it all and, to be honest, I felt a little paralyzed when I first saw it. It felt like it would not be possible to sort it all, even if we worked for months.
But Sarah on our staff was able to get into a groove with Maria. When Sarah is not assisting our clients she is a yoga instructor. This gives her a calm, soothing presence. By giving Maria time to get used to her and trust her not to throw anything away carelessly, she managed to convince Maria to agree that some papers could be discarded. They made a list together. It started with things like “expired coupons, magazines from more than two years ago, and old grocery lists.” As they worked, Sarah would add to the list (all with Maria’s approval), until finally Sarah was able to throw away roughly ninety percent of the papers she found.
The longer the list became, the quicker the work progressed. Eventually they worked themselves down to papers that had belonged to Maria’s parents. She had always felt it was disrespectful to toss any of their papers, but Sarah patiently showed her how much of their papers were things exactly like those on Maria’s discard list. Slowly, Maria allowed herself to part with these papers as well.
The best news was that they were able to find a bunch of papers Maria needed. By the end, they had a box of financial documents that Maria would need in her new apartment, and a box with tax records from recent years. They also had more than a few boxes of family memorabilia. It was a little more than we wanted her to keep, but a lot less than she would have kept if we hadn’t sorted so diligently with her.
If you have a lot of papers collected, you are probably beating yourself up for not tackling it. The truth is that sorting papers and files is excruciatingly boring. Don’t be hard on yourself if you’ve let it go. But please keep in mind that if you don’t handle it now, you may find that someone else has to do this chore for you one day.
Start by preparing a list of things you need to keep: tax records going back seven years, documents related to your property if you own it, records of stock purchases, etc. Everyone’s situation is unique, so you should consult with an accountant or financial adviser as you prepare this list.
With this list in hand, commit to sorting your files in 2-3 hour increments and stay focused on the task during that time. Keep anything on your list but try to be committed to discarding the rest.
You should shred anything that includes sensitive information like your social security number, bank account numbers, or health records. There are services that will shred on-site and do not cost that much, relatively. This will give you the freedom to shred a lot at one time.
And if you’re feeling discouraged, remember Maria. It took time and patience, but she managed to turn that
