My mother told me when I first started working to hang on to my pay stubs. Now I’ve got drawers full of them, mostly from my current employer, for whom I’ve worked for the last five years.
Is there any reason to keep them around? Is there some sort of dispute that might arise over what I was paid three years ago where my pay stubs might be the trump card? Or is it only useful to keep the last few months’ worth?
Does anyone else here hang onto them for a long time? Or is this another of my mother’s sins against me to add to the list I’m keeping for when it’s time to put her in a home and I need to stiffen my spine?
Gotta go: time to wash my hands for the 30th or 40th time today (thanks, Mom).
We hang onto em until we get sick of seeing em sitting around the house, then we chuck em out. We don’t even open them half the time, as long as the direct deposit is in the right ballpark.
How about those of us that don’t get them in the first place? ie: My payroll is entirely paperless. If I’m so inclined, I can go to an intranet site and see my pay vouchers, but otherwise, money just appears in my account.
I like it - it’s one less envelope to open and one less piece of paper to put into the paper purgatory, otherwise known as a file folder.
Even with the IRS, however, they generally won’t go back more than three years - in fact, the IRS tells you that you don’t have to save stuff longer than that, with some exceptions, like certain property records. For your typical garden-variety tax audit problem, the statute of limitations is three years.
Hang on to them and reconsile them with your w-2, and thenyou can destroy them. It is so easy to get over-run with important papers and then you will never find just what you need
