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When is the right time to thow out your documentation?

Started by MixedBag, Jun 19, 2019, 06:37:50 PM

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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.


The trouble with reality is that there's no background music.