Filing in Binders: UPDATE

Well, I wanted to give you an update on one of my favorite Less Stress Tools  ...Filing in Binders.

I posted this a little more than 6 months ago...this was my inspiration:

I started where I was, meaning not with all the supplies to make mine a cute as Jenna's at I Heart Organizing. But I loved the concept and wanted to initiate the process right away.

Here is what I started with, using what I had with big plans to cute it up ASAP:

Well, here we are six months later:

SO, clearly I havent gotten to the cutesy part yet (still REALLY want to!). For now,  these babies are stuck away in a cabinet. This works good for me, because they are accessible and organized, but not seen.

What I have lacked in the time and effort to make them more presentable, though I have made up by how much I USE them.

Seriously, this one of my favorite Less Stress Tips ever!

I love that I have a place to store those pieces of paper I just can't part with. Also everything in them is so accessible. I can so easily look at a bill from last month or file away a medical receipt in my Taxes binder (currently my favorite binder as of last night when I was doing the taxes!).

Its easy to manage, store and use...it's a winner all the way around!

Filing into binders has been so effective for me that I have bled it into several other areas of my home. I make binders for everything :)

The list of binders I started with included:  Monthly Bills, Taxes, Important Papers, Insurance and Warranties/Instruction Books (click here to learn about how I use those).

Since using this system for a bit I have added: Lesson Plans, School Work (for my oldest son, to keep his work samples together), and Household (also includes my Stress Less Journal), Everything You Need (for work on the EYN bible study), ThirtyOne (for my home business) and a second Warranties binder.

Basically, anything and everything that has paper, that needs ordered and collected goes in its own binder.

I will tell you, as I suspected this system earned its wings when I had to do this years taxes. Since I started the binder system in June of last year, I had a little catch up to get my Taxes binder up to date. I had to collect a few receipts for the year up to that point but since then its been easy to collect and store any more that have happened since then.

Sitting down with the taxes this week, it was so nice to have everything we needed to itemize our medical, education, work expenses and charity contributions. No scrounging for receipts, no digging through file folders or trying to remember what money we spent.  Just open the binder and it was all there!

This system has been a great tool in my home! ...tell me, do you us it or another system like that works well for you?