When is the right time to thow out your documentation?

[MixedBag]

There are advocates of tossing all of your documentation once your child emancipates....and there are advocates of the need to preserve history because too often history gets re-written by alienators....  Well, I share another reason today NOT to throw it out that caught me by surprise.  I divorced #2 in 1996 and did not ask for my last name to change.  I kept it.  Then 6 months later, I went to the local court to have it changed legally and pressed on with life.  Well, today I find out that the VA doesn't have my current last name in their system correct in ALL of the different departments.  I was active duty military, even retired under my maiden name, but this one flippin' office or department still has my former name.  So I need a state ID AND divorce to show I was allowed to change my name.  I said "But it's not in the divorce, can't you accept my passport, or my retired military ID,or my DDForm214?"  He said NO, it has to be a court order.  THANKFULLY, I'm anal when it comes to documentation -- and I had it handy in my "all about Iris" file...and I could send off a copy and now wait.  But imagine if I had to contact the court -- 12 hours away -- ask for a record to be pulled that's over 20 years ago (which takes 3 - 5 business days) because back then, NOTHING was electronic.....

[Waylon]

Good question...
I threw out about 90% after my son turned 21. I kept a few specific items like my hand written diaries/logs, and a few court docs that I thought had significance (like the parenting evaluation report).

The rest I took and burned in a friend's backyard fire pit. I had more than 3 feet of paper (!!) stacked up to burn.

If you think you might need any of it someday you could always scan all of it with a document scanner and then trash the physical copies. Burn a couple CDs and also throw copies on a couple of thumb drives. Or, zip it all up and put it in an Amazon S3 bucket,  that way it'll never ever get lost.