Going paperless

My wife and I were cleaning our house this weekend and it struck me just how many piles of paper we had.  For lots of good reasons you get paper and want to keep it (sometimes it has important info, sometimes it's a keepsake) but I was shocked by how cluttered our house was by the various bits (including copies of bills long paid, expired coupons, etc.) 


Even after brutally going through and recycling there were still lots of stuff we 'had to keep'.  I made a decision this weekend to see if I could transition my household to be largely paperless.


My first step started with a purchase and a change in bill paying:

My purchase was a Fujitsu SnapScan s1500m -- I've seen Fujitsu at Mac world for several years and while I've always kind of liked the idea the price (~$404 at Amazon) was always more than I wanted to pay.  That changed when I spent almost an hour trying to scan in documents with my trusty HP all in one.  The HP is fine for a few items but for any kind of volume it's pretty horrible -- It's slow and can't reliably feed more than a few sheets at a time.


I'm hoping the Fujitsu SnapScan fixes all of that.  My plan is to shove everything I can find that I don't want deleted in there and pdf it up.  For some of the docs I'll keep them in Evernote but for most of them I'll probably just store them away (maybe archive them off every year or so)





For bill pay I enabled a feature that's been on my account for a while.  I switched from Quicken for the PC to doing finances online recently and as part of the switch I went to web based bill pay  -- One feature of online bill pay is they can send the bill directly to your account and you can view & pay online (no more paper -- Get rid of it at the source!)


I'll report back in a few weeks on how things are going..