» Ditch the Monthly Paper Statements?

In a futile attempt to organize myself, I was wondering what I should do with 5+ years worth of credit card, bank account, and other accounts monthly statements.For someone that constantly advocate computer online-based banking, I have quite a large amount of monthly paper statements.

These days the companies are always trying to get us to go paper-less. It does save them quite a bit afterall. I still haven’t gone with paper-less statements though. Although I can download each of my monthly statements and save them on my computer, I honestly don’t trust my computer, even though I maintain it quite well (I also mess with it too much). I was thinking I can download and store them onto CDs, but I don’t know about that too.

The minute they let me retrive all my statements online, (not just the previous 6 months), I’ll go paper-less. Until then, the stacking of evenlopes continue.

They probably won’t ever do that though. I once visited Bank of America’s LA County processing center. If I recall correctly, after 6 months they store, compress, and archive the datas. After 15 years, they dump them. It’s not easy nor cheap to keep them available forever online. (Thats why you’ll need to pay to retrieve some statement from years back). Thinking about this now reminded me of those huge rolls of paper, colums of machines to process them, and the guys they were paying to stuff those envelopes. Definitely not cheap.

Just as a good backup, I think I’ll go ahead and start downloading these statements and storing them onto CDs. I’ll probably do a 6 months to 12 months interval for the CDs. Does anyone have any other ideas?

On a completely different subject… to the right you’ll see a picture of Sunset Beach, which you can find on the North Shore of Oahu island. Click on it to see the full picture. Unfortunately for us, a huge patch of cloud soon came and blocked the sunset… (do’h!)