How to Go Entirely Paperless at Home

Because I’ve unclut­tered, I have become more effi­cient, pro­duc­tive and more relaxed. I know where things are, and I’m not over­whelmed by too much infor­ma­tion, data, or paper­work. I have also steadily become more and more “high tech” doing paper­less and over-the-net/ online trans­ac­tions. Here is an arti­cle by Ariel Snapp from WISEBREAD on steps to help you start becom­ing paper­less at home:

Though it may involve some ini­tial time and energy, the long-term results of get­ting your impor­tant doc­u­ments and infor­ma­tion stored elec­tron­i­cally has numer­ous benefits.

Busi­nesses are increas­ingly less depen­dent on paper, but did you know it’s not only pos­si­ble, but also quite help­ful, to go paper­less at home?

Going paper­less at home can help you get orga­nized, save you money, and leave you with peace of mind that your impor­tant infor­ma­tion is pro­tected. Most impor­tantly, it pro­vides easy access to infor­ma­tion that you oth­er­wise may not remem­ber or doc­u­ment, such as med­ical his­tory or pass­words. Whether inten­tion­ally or not, many of us have started to reduce the amount of paper we use since the inven­tion of the com­puter. Now, with the use of today’s com­puter soft­ware and online tools, it is pos­si­ble to go entirely paper­less at home.

Though it may involve some ini­tial time and energy, the long-term results of get­ting your impor­tant doc­u­ments and infor­ma­tion stored elec­tron­i­cally has numer­ous benefits.

Ben­e­fits

Secu­rity: Most peo­ple are now com­fort­able using online bank­ing, and the vast major­ity of these soft­ware tools use the same level or more of encryp­tion that online bank­ing uses, as well as multi-factor authen­ti­ca­tion, time stamps, and var­i­ous secu­rity prac­tices to ensure the secu­rity of the servers where the infor­ma­tion is stored.

Orga­ni­za­tion: You can get more orga­nized with your impor­tant infor­ma­tion and have it eas­ily acces­si­ble from any­where, search­able, sharable (when desired), and archivable.

Envi­ron­men­tal: There is less impact on the envi­ron­ment if peo­ple use less paper.

Sav­ings: Though you may have to pur­chase some of these tools, you will be sav­ing money on ink, stamps, envelopes, and paper costs if you store your files, eState­ments, and bills securely online, or use bill pay­ment systems.

Bar­ri­ers to Adoption

Time: The amount of time it takes to get all of your pass­words, health info, and doc­u­ments uploaded to the online tools may seem daunting.

Cost: There is often a cost asso­ci­ated with some of the soft­ware and online tools.

Fear: Though in actu­al­ity elec­tronic stor­age is much more secure than hav­ing paper in the mail or a fil­ing cab­i­net, some peo­ple might not trust the authen­tic­ity or secu­rity of online tools. Always do the research and make sure that you can trust any com­pany before you do busi­ness with them or share any per­son­ally sen­si­tive information.

The fol­low­ing tools and soft­ware will get you on your way to going paper­less at home.

Banks, Invest­ments & Credit Cards
Nearly every finan­cial insti­tu­tion, from your local bank or credit union to eTrade, encour­ages the use of elec­tronic state­ments and bill pay­ment. This is ben­e­fi­cial to the orga­ni­za­tion because it saves them money, but it is also good for con­sumers because they have quick access to many years of their trans­ac­tion state­ments securely stored online. If you haven’t already, con­sider using eState­ments for your bank­ing, as well as elec­tronic bill pay­ment. Bill pay is usu­ally free, and it allows you to stop wor­ry­ing about recur­ring pay­ments and sched­ule any and all of your bills online. No more state­ments, checks, envelopes, or expen­sive stamps. You can also use many online or software-based account aggre­ga­tion tools such as Mint, Thrive, and Quicken (MS Money is no longer avail­able), which allow you to store and track your accounts and invest­ments, cre­ate bud­gets, and man­age your net worth over time.

Cable & Util­ity Com­pa­nies
The major­ity of cable and util­ity com­pa­nies encour­age the use of elec­tronic state­ments. Depend­ing on how you use these doc­u­ments for busi­ness, you may still pre­fer get­ting printed ver­sions. If you con­sider going paper­less, you can still store the PDF or elec­tronic bills on your com­puter (make sure to reg­u­larly back them up) or securely online, using the online stor­age tools dis­cussed below.

Doc­u­ment Stor­age & Per­sonal Online Fil­ing Cab­i­nets
It’s now pos­si­ble to store your impor­tant legal paper­work, state­ments, insur­ance infor­ma­tion, or back­ups of any of your impor­tant doc­u­ments online. Online tools like Orggit and Ecofile, or desk­top tools like Devon­think (for Mac) [or Ever­note], offer per­sonal secure online fil­ing cab­i­net solu­tions com­plete with fold­ers. Best of all, they are search­able. Typ­i­cally, you’ll want to scan and store your doc­u­ments as PDFs, and then upload them to these tools. Devon­think is unique with intel­li­gence that can scan and auto-categorizes your doc­u­ments right into the soft­ware sav­ing you time. Though this process can be time-consuming, con­sider doing this as part of an over­all paper fil­ing cab­i­net clean up process. Save the most impor­tant and recent files, scan them in, then shred these files to fur­ther pro­tect your per­sonal infor­ma­tion. You’ll want to make sure you have a good doc­u­ment scan­ner to sim­plify this process. (Note, use your judg­ment and never shred your most impor­tant orig­i­nal doc­u­ments such as deeds, birth cer­tifi­cates, social secu­rity cards, or orig­i­nal receipts needed for tax purposes.)