Sorting Out My Finances

I'm a pretty organised person when it comes to finance and I have kept a record of my spending for years and have notebooks full of the details of  where every penny has been spent.  I also like to know where everything is, so that when I want to lay my hands on something I can, easily. 

In the last couple of years, however, I seem to have let a few things slip, what with being burgled, starting a small business from home and having builders in the house and stuff everywhere.  All my financial information was spread around in different places, some of it I had hidden in case of another break in, there was a pile of papers that needed filing that had been building up as I just hadn't been filing it all away regularly enough, and I just didn't know where exactly everything was.  My solution was to just shove as much as I could into a suitcase, stick it on top of the wardrobe and sort it out some other time.

I don't know if it's something about spring and spring cleaning, but I actually started sifting through it all this week and getting my financial house in order and it feels sooooo good.  To be honest it didn't take too long to break the back of it, but once you start making progress it is hard to break off and carry on with the normal things you have to do every day like make meals, etc. 

It was a couple of days before I finally got back to it properly, and by this time I had bought some storage solutions for filing it all away.  I spent about £6 in W H Smith yesterday and got enough files to put everything in once I had sifted it all down to the mimimum that I needed to keep.  Everything was filed in date order and filed neatly away in the filing boxes.   I believe I have to keep six years of accounts, as I have been filing my own personal tax return for the past 5 or so years for various reasons, so I couldn't be as ruthless as I would really like to be.  The folders, however, seemed to accomodate the various bits of paperwork pretty well and not look too ugly.   They were a definite improvement from previous arrangements anyway.

 

Finally, this morning, I rearranged some shelves to accomodate the new files and I managed to put a few more bits and pieces in the charity shop bag in the process.   As a consequence, it feels like I've had a productive morning and have finally ticked this item off my to do list after carrying it over for several weeks now.