If you are like me, you are always hesitant to throw out your tax returns and support stuff. But since we are buying a house I am trying to get rid of the unwanted or unneeded clutter and paper stuff. The loan company asked me to find my 30 year old divorce decree..can you believe that?? I looked in the file and found it, and a lot of old tax returns. I have decided to shred all the returns older than the 7 year statute of limitations.
As I grabbed the folders a bunch of checks fell out and I saw one made out to a football camp my youngest son went to in 2003; then a light bulb went off! I could use information in my taxes to reconstruct a timeline of events. This can be helpful for both scrapbooking and genealogy. Those returns show where you worked, what you may have won gambling or when an event may have occured if you wrote memos on your checks. Now I wish I had realized this before the last time I purged tax returns from our 29 year marriage!
So while you think about your taxes this year, or start your spring cleaning, think twice before just throwing them into the shredding. They can be a wealth of information.
Leave me a comment and tell me what you do with YOUR old tax returns.
