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I have 1099-B's & 1099-D's going back to the early '90's. I'm getting ready to move, so looking to toss stuff that isn't necessary. Is there any point to keeping those? I keep thinking, "on the off chance I'm ever audited for ancient tax returns, I might need these".
And this may be overly obsessive; but I have old receipts, utility bills, cc bills, with the cancelled checks etc. going back to the '80's. Any possible downside to tossing most of that? It's all neatly organized; but it all does take up space & weight. And I'm preparing to move, so trying to get rid of excess stuff.
There are reasons for a lot of this, I was self-employed going back to the late '70's, to the early '90's, so learned to be obsessive about record keeping, receipts, etc.--but I think I might have gotten a bit carried away with it all.
I have 1099-B's & 1099-D's going back to the early '90's. I'm getting ready to move, so looking to toss stuff that isn't necessary. Is there any point to keeping those? I keep thinking, "on the off chance I'm ever audited for ancient tax returns, I might need these".
And this may be overly obsessive; but I have old receipts, utility bills, cc bills, with the cancelled checks etc. going back to the '80's. Any possible downside to tossing most of that? It's all neatly organized; but it all does take up space & weight. And I'm preparing to move, so trying to get rid of excess stuff.
There are reasons for a lot of this, I was self-employed going back to the late '70's, to the early '90's, so learned to be obsessive about record keeping, receipts, etc.--but I think I might have gotten a bit carried away with it all.
TIA for any advice......
I've heard 7 years as the length of time to save tax forms/receipts. In the world of digital storage, you could theoretically save receipts for decades. I no longer keep the paper copies but keep digital and scanned copies of everything, backed up multiple different ways.
If you do plan on getting rid of your old documents, you should make sure they are shred. There are companies that will literally pick it up and shred it for you, if its a large amount of paperwork.
The farthest the IRS can go back for an audit is six years, so there's no point in keeping business records any longer than that.
I keep old utility bills just so I can compare usage from year to year, but beyond that there's no need to keep last month's bill once you have this month's bill showing that it was paid.
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