May was all about paper work. Our home binder is slowly filling up now and we have better systems in place to deal with all the paper clutter that comes into the house.
We got rid of our home phone a few years ago but I decided to make a message centre to put in our ‘family command centre’. Much easier to remember something I have to let hubby know if he’s out & forgets his mobile.
Bills – we have 2 major bills – rent for our business laptops and our internet/mobiles. Both get taken out on a certain day each month. Any incidental bills are filed into the appropriate folder and made not of in our budget. Due dates are added to the calendar. This system seems to be working ok for us.
I created a ‘family command centre’ in the kitchen under our whiteboard (& in between the Soda Stream and water filter). Notes and invites go on the cork board. This week’s menu is on the whiteboard. Our month calendar is underneath. Our family/home binder sits on the trolley underneath that along with my file for bills/mail that needs actioning (& our hand vac)
Next we moved onto tax items and receipts. Since we run our own small business I keep all our receipts in a lidded plastic box in the office and then after we have been to our accountant, I scan it or file it. At the end of the financial year I shred or burn any receipts we no longer need to keep. Anything that needs to be kept, including the previous years tax return info is kept in lidded file box, arranged by financial year
Our filing system is pretty simple – 2 files for each member of the family. One for important stuff I know we may need to access and one for papers that I want to keep but aren’t super important. The rest of our papers are sorted by what they are – sports, business, house etc Have used this month as a good excuse to go through and sort/shred our filing cabinets.
Challenge 21 was super easy – we rarely get magazines and any newspapers we get are piled in a bag and stored to help start our wood fire in winter. Catalogues get read then binned.
Challenge 22 looked at passwords, warranties and manuals. Since that finishes in June I’ll be back next month with how we are going.
Kitchen update – a bit messy but nothing a quick tidy wouldn’t fix. It’s finally sinking in how easy it is to keep the kitchen cleanish. Still trying to get the rest of the house on board.