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Keeping everything organized is one of the most important habits that everyone should develop.  For example if you have your receipts organized you won’t have to stress much when it comes time to do your taxes.  This is especially important if you are a business owner and can write off a lot of your expenses against your income.

Even if you are not collecting your receipts for the purpose of reducing your taxable income you can still benefit greatly by keeping them organized.  Reason being, it helps to know where you are spending your money so you can make wiser financial choices.  It is one of the first rules of money management.  Whenever you go see a financial adviser, they would want you to keep track of your expenses and based on that would devise your future financial plan.

Here is what I found to be extremely helpful.  By my bedside I have a big yellow envelope and it’s named march 2008.  Every night I put all my receipts for the month of march in it after I write them down in my notebook or computer.  Every month I get a new envelope for that month and put all my receipts in that envelope.  I have tried to keep the envelopes in a nicer and safer place but I found that that just deterred me from putting my receipts in it.  I would always procrastinate putting receipts in that envelope until a few months worth of receipts piled up by my bedside.  So, one day I just decided to keep the monthly envelope by my bedside and it’s worked like a charm ever since.  At the end of the month this envelope gets sealed while a new one opens up.

And I got these envelopes from the dollar store.  I believe 10 envelopes for $1.00 + tax = $1.13 or so. Not too bad of an investment.  And it keeps my accountant happy  as well.

Prior to doing any sort of organizing for my receipts I used to keep them in a plastic bag.  Plan being that I would just sit down one day and copy everything to an excel sheet instead of wasting time every single day.  Well, that doesn’t work!  It is an overwhelming task when you have to do it and not to mention that the ink on a lot of the receipts got erased.

So, try it out and I am sure you will like it.