My challenge for the week was to conquer paper clutter!

I had already gone through quite a bit when I did my desk.

Then more when I cleaned out my magazines.

This week I did my bill organizer.

I have a pretty good routine with paper coming into the house.

• Junk mail directly into recycling or shredding bin (if needs to be shredded)
• School stuff gets looked at and recycled.
• Things I want to keep go into either boys basket on hutch (drawings and projects may want to keep, but don’t need available)  We go through the basket at the end of the school year and they pick out 10 things to keep.
• Things I need to reference go into my Fridge File
• Bills go into the Bill Organizer

The Bottom 2 Sections of the Bill Organizer work great, but that top part hadn’t been cleaned out in well over a year.

I found quite a few treasures!

• Lots of Golden Spoon freebies.
• Other free kid meal coupons I had forgotten about
• A homework pass for T1
• Free movie tickets!
• His $25 gift certificate for Amazon
• I found a $50 gift card I forgot I had gotten.
• Our passports!

So I realized I needed a new place for key things, like restaurant coupons/free meals.  I moved them to my coupon drawer in a nice big folder.  Easy to find and it will help me remember to use them!

I then decided to try to take the bills out of the envelopes before putting them up.  I also am putting business bills/receipts in the top section, family on the bottom and the middle is for other assorted things to be FILED!

I guess the key will be to actually file them when I pay the bills!

Here is the finished product.

 

Bonus:  Family Calendars

Then as a bonus, I finally got rid of the family calendars I had been saving for the last 10 years.

I actually spent a few hours before Christmas scanning each one and had it made into a book using Blurb.   I gave it as a gift to family members as presents.  But I found it was hard to let go of the calendars.  I am not sure why.

I decided to take a pictures of them and I have the book with all of those memories there.  But this challenge gave me the final push to let them go.  Into the recycling they went and I only feel a tiny bit sad. 🙂