Rhonda Bracey: At Random

I had a shelf-load of paperwork I needed to sort out. That was the start of a major undertaking!

When I put the tub of that paperwork out in the shed, I saw tubs of documents from years ago and decided to tackle one of them. Just one at a time otherwise it’s too overwhelming! The first tub was personal tax information from 1994 to 2003! I have NO idea why we’ve kept it all these years (by law we only need to keep tax info for 7 years). At the end (about an hour, so not as daunting as I first thought), I’d reduced the first tubful of paper to just a handful of sheets to keep and a mountain of paper to shred.

I found a couple of interesting things in amongst it all—my first-ever invoice from iinet in 1998 for my internet connection (I’m still with them some 25 years later!), an invoice for my first-ever digital camera (a Sony Mavica for the princely sum of nearly $1200 in 1997! Yes, it took 3.5″ floppy discs and was a clunky monster), an old group certificate which showed my gross income in 1995 was some $45K, and a 1997 bill from the Qantas Club offering various membership levels. I think I opted for life membership after this period expired, an option that hasn’t been offered by Qantas for many years now.

I’ve since tackled quite a few more tubs though I haven’t yet started on the business paperwork (I’ve had my business since 1999). And I’ve created mountains of bags of shredded paper! Those 10 L kitchen caddy compostable bags (the pale green ones in the photo above) were running out quickly. But Bunnings had 54 L ones! So I bought 2 rolls (40 bags), and have already filled nearly 10 of them! Three are already in the 240 L FOGO* bin, 1 is partly full next to the shredder, and these 6 are awaiting their turn to go into the region’s compost heap!

My husband, sister, niece and nephews should be grateful I’ve done this now!!!

• FOGO = Food Organics, Garden Organics, and yes shredded paper is allowed in this bin

I’ve been purging old paperwork from the storage boxes in the shed. And I found this gem today. The struggle was real folks, with the bank saying you will no longer be able to pay your mortgage in the original time frame and offering suggestions for what you could do.

In my case, I got someone in to share my house (and made a lifelong friend as a result!), which certainly took some pressure off. And yes, that mortgage interest rate was 17%!!!! I’d taken out the loan 12 months earlier when it was 13.25% and had budgeted for 15%, but by the time it got to 17%, everything was hurting because my teaching salary was fixed and going nowhere.