I've been working at the Bentley Historical Library for a couple months now, a place full of professionals with graduate degrees and decades of experience making decisions about which documents are worth keeping and which are not. I've learned that there are two broad categories of documents - archives, which have historical value, and records, which have business or operational value. If I work there another ten or twenty years, I may gain a deeper understanding of what I should and shouldn't be keeping from amongst the thousands of pieces of paper stuffed in boxes and file cabinets in my basement.
I'm not, by nature, a hoarder. My instinct is to get rid of everything. To dump the entire box in the recycling bin without even reviewing the content. But that would be unwise, and so I spent a couple hours going through the file cabinets and pulling out a few key records that I thought might be necessary someday.
I have not looked at anything within this box for any real world reason for over ten years. Everything that made the cut is a record of some fact from my life and which I believe may be needed at some point in the future. Our estate plan and living wills, of course. Tax returns. Home purchase documents from the house we live in now. Release of liens. Birth certificates.
What got culled: bank statements. Expired insurance policies. Old credit card statements. Social security statements. Other retirement account statements. College saving plan statements. Statements and statements. Ten years worth of statements.
So many statements that Rich had to take them to work in a garbage bag. He's been feeding them into the shredders in small batches all week.
With all the negatives about electronics, this is one positive: ream upon ream of paper, no longer necessary, because all these statements are now available on-line.
The bad news: the one document I do really need - an appraisal of our house from a few years ago, when we refinanced - was not in the box. Another example of the Case of the Purloined Letter: the snowstorm of paper hides the single flake.
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