Peter Walsh's Organizing Ideas for Every Room in Your Home

Many people are uncomfortable with shredding or discarding paid bills, but if you want to keep these records, you need to keep the paperwork under control. Start by purchasing a 12-month expanding file. When you pay bills for, say, June, place them in the June section. A year later, if you haven't needed to look at the bills, it's highly unlikely that you'll ever need them again. Shred them. To organize receipts, a simple, low-tech solution is to use two bankers' spikes. Get in the habit of cleaning receipts out of your wallet or purse daily. Place receipts on one of the spikes as they come in. When one spike is full, start the other. If you haven't needed any of the receipts by the time you fill up the second spike, throw out everything on the first.