How long do you keep bills and credit card receipts before trashing them?

I need to start getting rid of clutter. How long do you keep your various utility bills and credit card receipts before shredding them and throwing them away?

I have carbon checks to verify payment if the need arises.

I was looking for the 5 minute option.

makes me write the date paid, the amount and the check number on them and then I have to file them away neatly in a regular file cabinet. Toss them out? Over his dead body. He is somewhat anal, but he is cute.

so I suppose collecting outdated receipts isn't that strange.

When I was a kid my friend's dad collected newspapers in the basement. He had every newspaper going back 30 years, all stacked and bundled neatly. I have no idea what he planned to ever do with them because he didn't like to read anyway, and only skimmed the paper each day when it arrived. Yet having those stacks of newspapers somehow gave him comfort.

Oh well. Maybe file cabinets full of outdated records gives him comfort. Look on the bright side, at least he's not collecting exotic snakes.

As soon as a payment is posted on a new statement I trash the original statement. So once my electric bill shows last month's payment, I toss out last month's statement because then I know that I paid, and I know that the electric company knows that I paid. Nothing left to prove to anyone so there's no point in keeping the evidence. If A dispute arises (which it never has) I can get an online image of the cancelled check from the bank.

This way I never have more than one statement for each bill.

Credit card receipts, once I get the product home and verify that it's in good condition (e.g., the DVD plays or the electric blanket heats up) I toss the receipts.

I keep last weeks paycheck stub and toss any older ones.

This system has worked just fine for me for 40+ years.

And, for what's it's worth, I empty my email inbox daily, saving somewhere else anything I need to keep.

about 10 years or so. Depends on when I get round to cycling through the prior year. I have mailla envelopes that say "statements 9 years old" "staements 8 years old" etc. and hanging folders for the "current" year, which becomes prior year before I merge them all into one manilla envelope.

I like being able to look back and see what utilities used to cost, for example. Did I do better or worse at conserving?

Then I have a shredding party.

i spent a whole day shredding old stuff (about 5 years of stuff). now i have a whole shitload of packing material!

I keep nothing...maybe I'm asking for trouble, but I used to keep everything for 5 years and all it got me was a mountain of paper. Not keeping bills and receipts is working much better :)