This coming Saturday, April 28, is "Community Shredding Day" according to the firm "Shred-It," which is making its shredding services available for free in many communities across the United States. They had their shredding day in Canada last month but I found out too late. This is a good opportunity if you have a lot of papers to shred; shredding is an important way to reduce the risk of identity theft.

To find the closest community shredding event to you, go to:

http://www.shredit.com/communityShredUSA.asp

I've spent the last month or so going through old papers and work files that I no longer need; there's way too much for me to shred at home with my light-duty shredder; I've got six archive boxes full already of paper to be shredded and I'm not done yet.

Shred-it makes house calls, but it's expensive ($95 a pop, although if you have friends or neighbors with stuff to shred it could be worth sharing the costs). Alternatively you can bring your paper to them (in standard archive boxes); here in Canada they charge $5 per box to shred them. I have a small office shredder here that I use daily for things like ATM receipts, emails that I print out, and other small-volume shredding jobs, but you can destroy one of those little units quickly if you have hundreds of papers to shred at a time. A shredding service is a better solution for jobs like that...or if your place of employment shreds its papers you could check to see if it would be okay to bring in your personal papers for shredding.

great heads-up... most people don't realize how much they need to shred and hang onto stuff forever.

Which also raises the question, how much should I shred?

For most people, in general, anything older than 3 years is fair game for the shredder. The laws in your state/country may vary, as will your specific personal financial dealings. There are a few things that you want to hold onto a bit longer, including expired-contracts and bankruptcy-related materials. And there are a few things that you should keep permanently, such as loan documentation, insurance policies, and year-end statements. This is NOT a comprehensive list, however.

But most people don't need those quarterly IRA statements or monthly brokerage statements if you've got the year-end summaries that detail all the same activity. Most people do not need to hang onto monthly utility statements from 2002.