Going Paperless

I just want to say how excited I am to be almost completely paperless! We were starting to collect stacks of paper- product manuals, important receipts, school schedules, important documents, past taxes, interesting articles, etc. I could only foresee the piles getting larger and I was already having trouble figuring out how to keep everything manageable and organized. Too much for too small a space.

Then I came across a brilliant but simple idea and could not believe I hadn't thought of it. It makes so much sense! Simply scan all your important documents and save them as .PDF files on your computer. Duh!! How smart.

So the past few weeks I've been dwindling down our paper files. First the manuals. Then the receipts. Then insurance stuff. Then random articles I've been wanting to keep. It's so easy. I feel like I have my own file system on my computer. I still kept some things paper because I like to move them around when I need them, like recipes.

We don't have a fancy scanner or anything. Just an HP printer we purchased on sale for $50 from Walmart. It prints, scans, and copies. It's nothing fancy, but works great and doesn't take up any more space than a regular printer. It gets the job done (and I like that it's wireless so we can put it across the room instead of right next to the computer).

Note: if you store important documents on your computer, it is critical that you back up your information often. Someday I would love to purchase an online cloud storage space that automatically backs up my C: drive every week or so. Until then, we use our good 'ol Toshiba external hard drive- it's about the size of an ipod which makes it nice to carry on trips in case I want access the files from our home desktop. I back everything up once a month (or after scanning any important docs). The other day Ben's laptop almost crashed, and I was very happy we had been able to back up all his documents!!!