Hasta La Ideas

Reader Erin submitted the following to Ask Unclutterer:

I’ve been focusing a lot lately on reducing my paper clutter in my home office. I’ve made some good progress, but there is one particular type of clutter that nags at me every time I try to cut down: The Financial “Prospectus” that every fund and investment seems to send out every other week (OK, maybe it’s a few times a year. It feels like a lot).

I am only 27 years old and therefore don’t have too many investments, and yet I still have a few stacks of these bulky booklets that are at best the size of a magazine and at worst the size of a small novel. I can only imagine that there are other readers out there who are just SWIMMING in these booklets.

What’s the rule of thumb? How long *should* one keep these books? If you tell me I can recycle at least some of them, I will be one happy girl.

The first thing you need to do is call your financial advisor and see if he or she can e-mail you PDFs of these booklets instead of mailing them to you. Most financial institutions are looking for ways to cut back on expenses right now, and the trend is to provide these as digital documents to their clients. I made the switch about two years ago. It saves them money and saves me space.

Unfortunately, this won’t take care of the documents you already have in your home. I’d ask your financial advisor if he or she can e-mail you copies of the old ones, too. If your advisor doesn’t have access to those files, I recommend keeping just the annual booklets for anything more than a year old. You may want to keep the quarterly booklets from the current year if you have an interest in such things.

And, when I say “keep,” I mean pull out the staples, scan the document, save it as a PDF on your computer’s hard drive, and recycle the original. These documents are good to reference, but they’re not legally necessary for you to keep in paper form.

Thank you, Erin, for submitting your question for our Ask Unclutterer column. Great name, too!

Do you have a question relating to organizing, cleaning, home and office projects, productivity, or any problems you think the Unclutterer team could help you solve? To submit your questions to Ask Unclutterer, go to our contact page and type your question in the content field. Please list the subject of your e-mail as “Ask Unclutterer.” If you feel comfortable sharing images of the spaces that trouble you, let us know about them. The more information we have about your specific issue, the better.