Money Crashers: 3 new articles

Money Crashers has just popped up three new articles of mine all in a row: pop, pop, pop. Actually, two of them aren't completely new, because the editors decided to split this old article of mine into two. So now you've got one article on the pros and cons of paid credit monitoring and how it compares to other ways of protecting your information for free, and a separate article on how the top credit monitoring services—both free and paid—compare in terms of their features and performance. (I was not able to compare them in terms of cost, sadly, because it's a new policy at Money Crashers never to mention the actual price of anything. The theory is that prices change so fast, our articles would quickly go out of date if we did this. Which is true, but I still think it's not very useful to tell people "X is a better buy than Y" if we can't say what X and Y actually cost.)

The other new article is on a different topic: how long you actually need to keep all those documents that mark every moment of our modern lives. Store receipts, junk mail, bills, bank statements, tax returns, pay stubs—do we actually need to keep all this stuff? If so, for how long? And if we do, how are we supposed to keep it organized so we can actually find it when we need it? And if we don't, can we just toss it in the bin, or does we have to shred it so identity thieves won't get their hands on it?

My article answers all these questions. It outlines what all those documents are actually good for, how long to keep them, several ways to organize them in both paper and electronic form, and how to dispose of them safely. (One tidbit I learned while researching this document: If you use a crosscut shredder, the kind that's recommended for optimal security, you can't just throw the resulting fragments into your curbside recycling bin, because they would blow away and make a mess. It can still be recycled, but it needs to be packaged differently to make it work. You can, however, toss them into your compost bin if you have one.)

How Long to Keep Important Documents (and What You Can Shred)