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I keep my statements and record my credit card purchases on an old-fashioned ledger sheet. Helps you keep track of spending easier and how much you're getting charged in interest for carrying a balance.
I don't get it with the ledger, doesn't your bank have online tools to see your purchases? Mine even attempts to put them in spending categories that it gets right about 90% of the time gas, groceries, restaurant, utilities, etc. It also lets me make custom categories to put stuff in and learns so I don't have to repeat it, like if I buy bait and put it in a custom category "fishing" then next time I buy from that shop it'll automatically be categorized as fishing.
Then at end of year tracking spending is far better than handwritten, can generate basic reports for spending by category, make pretty pie graphs, and download the data to a spreadsheet.
Also good idea is to have it text you for any credit card purchase. My wife hates this component of it but if someone swipes my card and uses it to buy something I'd know in about 3 seconds.
Not everyone goes back 5 years online. Your big banks do, and many provide a year end summary account. I only print the statements with activity, then they get bagged with my taxes.
Credit unions are a different business model and typically only have a year or two.
I once had a dispute with an authorized user and had 5 years of statements sent to me from Discover.
How should the statements be saved? As in, just printed? Save it on flash drive? Any other forms?
I download them from the bank and save them on my computer hard drive and every so often I back them up elsewhere.
The main reason I save them is that for one, they take up very little disk space. Two, every once in a while I want to remember what I paid for something or where I bought something from, and I have the statements to refer back to.
Mine are all online, I pay online and I look at them online, I didn't need hard copies until I was "randomly" selected for the IRS Research Audit.
I was required to have hard copies of all financial statements of any type of account for the audit year (2 years earlier) plus the month before and after. Most were easily found online. Some didn't go back that far and required a phone call.
Not a big deal. It was the only time I ever needed statements.
No--it's all online. I got tired of shredding so much paper, and stopped receiving any and all paper statements. Receiving paper statements also increases the possibility of identity theft.
Several years ago I went digital. I receive nothing by mail; notifications of new statements are sent by email. I log into my account and pay online with free bill pay. Your bank should offer it for free, if not you need to change banks. I keep a record of every credit card transaction (date, amount, merchant, and sometimes what was purchased if it was an important purchase), as I do every check transaction, on my computer. If I need statements (credit card or checking), I download them and keep them on my computer.
I keep my receipts until I get the bill and see they match up. I might keep one with a warranty and keep pharmacy ones, stapled to the appropriate paperwork and filed elsewhere. At the beginning of every year, I pull out all the statements (and other bills) and put them in order and keep them with that year's taxes. I keep all the extraneous paperwork for about 7 years since it's just 7 file folders, then I ditch all the paper and just keep copies of the forms. I asked my accountant and he said to keep them for 10 years, so I do. I suppose I could scan them, or do what my father did and stick them in a box in the attic. Still wondering what I'm going to do with that box full of his financial life.
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