[ # ] Saving Paper and Ink: How to Go Paperless

/* Posted April 1st, 2008 at 9:27am */
/* Filed under Apps, Life */

Go Paperless

I never receive any bank statements or credit card statements in the mail anymore. Why should I? It uses our precious resources and costs us all money. Plus it wastes my already limited physical storage space. Before I went paperless, I used to leave my statements in a filing cabinet to rot, never looking at them again after I first received them. Banks and credit card companies all do business online nowadays, and it’s supremely easy to print your statement from their websites if you enroll in their online services. Don’t get me wrong, I still collect all my bank and credit card statements, I just store them in an infinitely more convenient place: my hard drive. If you have Adobe Acrobat, you can simply save your monthly bank statement as a PDF file and file it away somewhere on your hard drive. Same goes for credit card statements.

What does this do? It makes it easy to search your statements (I bet your computer is a faster searcher than you are) and saves you on paper and ink costs. The great thing is, if you ever really need a paper statement, it’s only a click away to send it off to your printer. Filing is a breeze as well because it is just a matter of saving a PDF file to a folder on your drive versus rifling through a big filing cabinet already stuffed with other paper.

Why not take it a step further from your statements and extend it to receipts? I used to print all my receipts after making online purchases, only for them to suffer the same fate as my bank statements. Today, I use the same idea and just print everything to PDF. I won’t see it if I don’t look for it, but it’s always there when I need it. Need a PDF writer? Try out CutePDF, it’s free and lightweight and most importantly, gives you no more excuses to start going paperless.

Another essential tool for going paperless is your trusty old scanner. Don’t use your copy machine to make hard copies unless you really need the hard copy. Consider scanning your document instead and saving it to your hard drive, either as a PDF or image file. Again, the idea is that when you need the hard copy you only need to open up your scanned file and print it. If you never have to print it, well you just saved yourself some paper and toner costs, my friend. Scanners are also a great way to convert your paper documents to paperless documents. Have some old statements that you just can’t throw away but still want to clear up some space? Just scan it and then shred it. The file is secure in your computer.

If we all went paperless we’d really help to preserve our natural resources and money. Just make sure to make backups frequently. You don’t want to lose everything because of a corrupted hard drive.