Receipt Repository

Sorry about the long delay between posts. We've been pretty busy traveling and getting ready for summer. This post is a little silly, but some of you might find it useful.

If you're like me, you are probably a little anal about saving receipts, particularly for credit card transactions. In the past, I didn't really have a system for organizing them; I just put them in a stack in a drawer. They were usually in rough chronological order, but that wasn't guaranteed. Every few months I would sort through the pile and shred everything more than a couple months old. It took quite a while to check the dates on every receipt, verify it wasn't a receipt that needed to be saved, and was a generally unpleasant task.

A little over a year ago, I saw someone using a handy little expanding file to organize their receipts by month, and I was instantly sold. I bought one on Amazon and haven't looked back. The main advantage is being able to confidently ditch old receipts without shuffling through them.

One important section I added to the file was one I call "Keep." That area is for receipts I want to save. They are usually for more expensive items whose receipt I want to save for warranty purposes. Whenever I buy something like that, I put the receipt in that section and I know not to throw it away.

This all begs the question, why I am so paranoid about saving every receipt? My justification is I will have evidence if I am ever mis-charged for anything. The real answer is I'm a little bit crazy. In my defense, I've gotten a lot better recently and I now often decline receipts for small transactions, but recovery is a process and I'm taking baby steps.

Do you save receipts? Let us know how and why in the comments.


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