There are many good reasons to keep your financial records as organized and accurate as you can. Good record keeping provides 1) proof, such as payment of bills, ownership, and employment or educational history; 2) data, for example, household inventories as documentation for insurance claims; and 3) protection for hard to replace documents. Besides knowing what types of records to keep, where you keep them, and how long to keep them for, will make life much simpler and less time consuming when you need to locate something of importance.

A good way to get started is to first set aside a work space designated for your organizational activities. This is where you will organize and process your bills to be paid and documents to be filed. To accomplish this you may want to set up a file cabinet or drawer in which to store your records. However you decide to organize yourself, your system should: