Organize Your Money - February’s Trail 2023

Getting your money organized can seem like an overwhelming task. Where do you start? What documents do you keep? How long do you keep them? Don’t worry, we’ve been there too. Getting organized will help you feel good about your situation, make filing taxes easier, save you time in the future, protect private documents and will help you during an emergency. Join us on February's Trail: Organize Your Money so you can feel confident in your financial organization!

Tips for Sorting

Over at Money Path, we like to start with our mail. We recommend the “one spot rule,” meaning whenever you pick up your mail you take it home and put it in one spot! From there you can sort through the junk, subscriptions or other items. Then you need to make sure you open your mail. Either do it when you get it, or pick a time every week to open the important items like bills and statements. Make sure you keep a calendar nearby and write down when things are due!

Now that our mail is sorted out, it’s time to gather all the important existing documents in your home. We like to use the seven folder category technique below. If you have no idea where to start, this is a great place to begin. The next best thing you can do is read through our list and see if this will fit your situation! Don’t be afraid to make some tweaks so the categories best fit your needs. Make sure you share your list in the comments below because it could help someone else out!

Category Checklist | 7 Steps!

1. Banking and Credit documents

   • Bank Statements

   • Credit Card Statements

   • Loans, Leases and Mortgages

2. Legal and Personal ID documents

   • Social Insurance Number

   • Birth Certificate

   • Marriage License

   • Divorce Records

   • Passport

   • Provincial Driver’s License

   • Provincial Health Card

   • OAS ID Card

   • Certificate of Indian Status

   • Government Employee ID Card

   • Canadian Military ID

   • Immigrations Documents

3. Income Tax Information

   • Tax Returns

   • Information Slips (T4, T4a, T3, etc.)

   • Medical, Child Care, Tuition, Donation receipts

   • Notice of Assessment

   • Self Employment Expenses

4. Investments

   • Registered Retirement Savings Plan

   • Registered Education Savings Plan

   • Registered Disability Savings Plan

   • Stocks and Bonds

5. Insurance and Warranties

   • Life

   • Home

   • Tenant

   • Vehicle

   • Warranties

6. Employment documents

   • Benefit Package

   • Offer Letter

   • Terms of Employment

7. Other

   • Wills

   • Power of Attorneys

   • Trusts

Tips for Storing

Now that we have all our folders ready and our important documents inside them, it’s time to talk about how to store all these items!

Banking, Credit and Investments

We recommend keeping these until you get updated documents. This would be things like monthly bank statements, loan statements, retirement and pension statements, credit card numbers or even a safety deposit contents list. There isn’t any benefit to keeping a history record of these, unless of course you want to! (Maybe then you can make an eighth folder!)

Legal Documents and Personal IDs

These are some of the most important documents you need to keep. You will probably even keep them your entire life. Items like your Birth Certificate and Social Insurance Numbers won’t ever change.

Insurance and Warranties

Warranties are pretty easy: keep these until the warranty expires you no longer have the item. Insurance is similar: keep the documents until you get updated ones!

Employment Documents

Take the time to read your employee benefit package as soon as you get it. You might be surprised at how many people still pay out-of-pocket for prescription medication, dentist visits, eye glasses, and even physio. Keep these documents until you change jobs, or until you plan changes.

Tips for Protecting

For documents you keep, make sure you store them in a safe location that you can remember and get to easily, but has restricted access to others. We also get asked about the differences and benefits between keeping electronic and paper copies. Call us old-school, but many of us are partial to hard copies, especially for people just beginning this journey!

Hard Copies

There is nothing wrong with keeping documents in a shoe box under your bed, but maybe a fire-proof locked box would be better! If you don’t want to keep them in your home, you could also consider a safety deposit box at your bank. This will keep them extra safe, but will cause more effort to access.

Electronic Copies

We personally like storing them, or at least backing the documents up, on an external thumb drive. This way if your laptop gets stolen, computer components break, or your email is compromised, you still have a copy of your documents. You probably won’t be able to completely paper free, so make sure you store this thumb drive where you store your hard copies!

Shredding Documents

We know it might seem unlikely, but people do sift through garbage and paper recyclables for financial information and identification documents. Protect yourself by shredding all important documents like bank statements, bills and old credit cards. When in doubt, shred it!

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Have questions?

Hey, we covered a lot in this blog post! We’re going to talk all about organizing your money for the month of February, so if you have any questions send them our way! You can drop them in the blog’s comments, or you can email us at info@moneypath.ca! Don’t forget to follow us on social media so we can blaze these money trails together!

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