Critter Notices
Critters is 30!
Last November, Critters turned 30 years old! Wow! Thanks so much to all of you, who've made it such a resounding success!
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Keep Your Records On Paper
I'm as digital as they come. If it can be done online, I do it.
There are only a few cases where I shy away from bits and favor atoms.
Paper records are one of them.
I saved myself thousands of dollars in taxes by having paper records of a stock transaction. The brokerage company said they no longer had records from the time I'd made the purchase. If I hadn't been able to prove when I made the purchase, and what price, I'd have had to pay thousands in taxes I didn't owe. Thank heavens I had the paper records.
Banks/etc. want you to switch to online statements, since it saves them money. Note, it saves them money, not you.
Don't expect your bank/etc. to keep these for you. They won't. They delete records after some usually short time. (3 months - 18 months - five years... none of those are long enough if you need one that's older. Don't think they keep offline backups forever, either. The case I mentioned, the place had no records past a certain date, period.)
This applies to financial transactions and anything else that might be important in the future. Proof for anything you deducted on your taxes, for example. (Paid your mortgage bill online and don't have a paper statement years later for proof? Your loss.)
Moral: Keep paper records.
That said, let me qualify it: Keep your own records. If you're religious about downloading online statements and keeping backups so you won't ever lose them, and they're in a standard format that you're sure won't become unreadable, then keeping your records digitally is fine. (But on your own hard drive, where you know they're there and they won't mysteriously vanish after some time.) If in doubt, get and keep paper.
