A Financially Productive Day

When I woke up this morning, I decided that I wanted to be a bit more productive today, and to this end I straight away set about re-organising my financial paperwork.  It's a job I've had on my to do list for a while now, and I'd bought some multi-pocket files from work to help with the task, but just hadn't got around to it in the lead up to Christmas.

To be honest, I always do my financial filing in January. I don't file things away all year, just put them in filing box, and then come January (because this was when I used to do a tax return), I would file them all away in their respective places and start collecting them again in the New Year.  

It's a system that works pretty well for me. It means that paperwork is always in one of two places, depending on how recent it is, and to be honest, I don't actually receive that much paperwork during the year, so the task isn't too onerous really. Many statements are now digital, which is fine by me, but I do keep a written record of account balances every month, just so I can keep track and calculate the total amount I have in savings/shares each month.

Anyway, the job took the whole morning and a lot of paper got put in the recycling box and a bit more in the shredding bin. Lots of very old bank leaflets and useless irrelevant paperwork was ditched to make a bit more space. By 3pm, it was all finished and everything safely filed away, and I'd also checked out my current state pension forecast to update my records. It had jumped quite considerably since I last got a statement 3 years ago, so I was pretty happy about that, so long as it is not phased out by the time I retire.

With that job done, and everything fitted back in the space allocated for it, it's one thing ticked off the January To Do List before we've even got to January 1st and I feel I can face the New Year and the financial challenges it may throw at me. Let's hope that there aren't too many of those.