Absolutely! When my Dad passed, I spent my Saturdays for a couple of months organizing, separating, collecting his paperwork for destruction, saving, etc. I didn’t keep track of what I shredded vs what we ultimately had taken to a shredding service, but it was significant, not to mention what we deemed disposable without destruction. We ended up with relatively small amount of records, tax returns, that were retained. We’re getting to the end of keeping his tax returns before shredding the last ones.

We’ve taken that lesson to heart pretty well. My accountant wife is old school and believed in a hard copy of everything from the beginning of our marriage. This resulted in one four drawer and two, two drawer file cabinets full of documents. We finally embarked on a reduction effort that takes us down to three file drawers of records for us and our respective parent’s estates. To be fair there are some file boxes of some records/family specific stuff, but the legal and records for ourselves is down to a very organized and manageable state.

The only thing we really need to work on is a more organized listing of user names/passwords/accounts with automatic drafts and a summary listing of assets that describes how those assets are configured….

Be very careful overheating a paper shredder. My son had a serious house fire. It only took a few minutes away from the shredder and the fire was going.