Spring Clean Your Documents Today

It's time to weed out your financial papers.

As the weather warms and you gear up for a big spring cleaning, it's also an excellent time to organize your financial papers. This is an important step toward getting your finances in shape.

Creating a filing system that works best for you is essential, but many people proceed directly to creating a paper-shuffling systems of loose papers and folders and forget other details that doom their organizing system.

So while you are cleaning and organizing the rest of the house, here's how to rethink how you store your financial papers and create a better system:

Determine a Central Location

Most people keep their important papers in the wrong place. They choose an out-of-the-way spot such as the basement, the back of a closet or a spare storage room instead of an area that is centrally located and easy to access.

If you fail to pick a place that makes it easy to immediately file away the papers, the papers will end up on desks, in drawers and spread among various boxes all over the house.

There is an easy way to determine if your current filing system is adequate. If you know exactly where all your tax information, credit-card statements, household bills, banking statements, appliance warranties and manuals, passports, investment papers, wills and insurance papers are without searching and they are easily accessible, then you have a good system.

If you are like most people and don't know instantly where all these documents are, then it's time to determine an easily accessible place for all of them.