The Paper Solution (Hardcover)

I was the person who had piles of paper that would simply get swept into a bag and stashed into a closet when people came over or was constantly putting things out of reach from the kids (but then forgetting where I the papers ended up). We are a family of full-time working parents and 3 kids under the age of 5, there is a constant influx of papers. I lost the water bill when it came in the mail and didn't pay it, my daughter drew stick figures all over her medical intake forms for school (which had to be picked up at her school and then taken to the doctors office again to be completed). It was bad and then I heard about Lisa. Lisa is an expert in paper organization and has created ingenious solutions to managing both incoming/active paper and stored paper (your filing cabinets). In an earlier life phase, Lisa is a teacher - which means that we get all of the added benefits of a trained teacher sharing her knowledge. When you read this book, Lisa walks you through step-by-step how to set up her organization systems, which includes a ton of free downloads and worksheets in her book. As someone who took her classes, I honestly was surprised by the amount of material and resources provided in the book. If this book had been around when I was struggling a few years ago, I could have easily read this and saved several hundred dollars. The value alone, far outweighs the cost of the book - because that is the type of person Lisa is. She goes through life experiences, finds a solution and then wants to share it with the world. The Sunday Basket is your new home for all of the weekly incoming and active papers. This is where we dump the mail, school forms, license renewal paperwork - it all has a home and I have a dedicated time every week to go through it. Do I love doing this? I rate it up there with cleaning the house every week. Needs to be done, so I do it and I also can tell when I skip a week. I can also tell you that I haven't lost a utility bill or handed in school forms late since I started using it. If you're thinking "Ok, that would help but I'm still not 100% convinced," neither was I or my husband. But then Lisa helped me get rid of 80% of my filing cabinet. We read over Lisa's what to save list and her guidelines, then made decisions about bills, statements and various other records. We dove in and our initial purge was 11 pounds of shredding (we didn't weight the recycling). That opened our eyes, clearly we had been doing all of this wrong and now what? This is where Lisa swoops in again with more solutions - binders and she tells you how to set these up in the final portion of her book. Portable "mini files" so if you need to leave in a hurry, you can grab you financial binder, medical binder or home binder. In addition, making these binders, makes you do a complete review of your finances, home or medical concerns. When we started our financial binder, we decided it was time to make a will. Our home binder was updated with all of