My favorite new program

Recently I decided to start storing all of my financial records in PDF format. This is a lot easier than the 15 or so 3-ring binders I have stuffed with about 10 years of old statements. It also allows me to do nice things, like burn a DVD copy of my records and store it with a family member in case of fire at my apartment.

I haven't yet bought a scanner to start converting old documents, but I did download as many statements as I could from my online accounts . For those accounts where a PDF was not available, but an online statement was, I found a program that allows me to "print to PDF". This program rocks. I wish I'd found this sooner.

My next steps are to get a scanner, get a shredder, and buy a thumb drive. I'm going to move all my data to an encrypted area on the thumb drive, and remove it from my computer when not in use. This will minimize the risk of storing such things directly on my computer.