With this newfound realization that I’m supposed to keep this paperwork, Peter and I decided to buy a filing cabinet and a new shredder. Apparently all of that great shredding that I did all year killed ours. (Can you sense the bitterness?) After visiting store after store only to learn that filing cabinets and shredders are both *really* expensive, we headed over to our neighborhood Goodwill. And lo and behold, we found both of these things for a total of $24.

We actually saw the guy wheeling this filing cabinet out onto the floor and chased him down. I think we terrified him.

(The sticker on the filing cabinet was there when we bought it. It was not an accessory that I chose.)

I was skeptical about buying a used shredder. I reasoned that someone probably donated it because it didn’t work, but Peter found one that someone had jammed paper into and didn’t feel like fixing. He patiently removed the jam and found an outlet to test it out. All the while I was shifting back and forth impatiently like an angry teen out shopping with her mother. He’s pretty great for putting up with me–and for other reasons as well!

I like our filing cabinet but I think I want to jazz it up a little bit. The boxes below are my inspiration, but I’m generally a neutral kinda gal who likes smaller pops of color.

{Little Green Notebook}

What do you guys think? I brought home a few swatches to get an idea of the shade of blue that I want to paint them, but so far I’m not loving any of them.

So, should I paint it blue, paint it grey (because that is always an option), leave it as is, or find a new idea all together? I know this one is already thinking long and hard to figure out a solution.

A little P.S.–If next year will be your first year filing taxes on your own, I am warning you save everything!

The first thing I did when I decided that we were really going to start saving was look for a place to put my money, and since I’m not one to stuff cash under the mattress, I did this is the form of online savings accounts. Our fabulously talented friend who works in finance, Caroline, tells us that we should be making riskier investments than  just putting our money into savings. I completely understand the logic behind where she’s coming from, but because  I’m not not much of a gambler, we’re hoping to buy this house sooner rather than later, and  because we may be undergoing some pretty big life changes in the next year, I want our money to be safe.

So, per advice from one of our other fabulous friends we opened up the computer and headed over to Bankrate.com. Bank Rate has a ton of free information on subjects like debt management, credit cards, and taxes to name a few, but we visited because of it’s ability to compare different interest rates for savings accounts and money market accounts. At that time, we chose the bank offering the highest interest rate at 1.8% APY. Since then our bank has dropped all the way down to 1.4%. As you can see by the screenshot of the search that I did this evening, a whole new crop of banks is at the top.

Now, we’re not going to move our money just because our bank is no longer leading with the highest interest rate but in a few more months we will re-evaluate where we’re housing our cash. Changing banks may be a huge pain,but now that online banks are so prevalent it’s easy to store your money across the country with just the click of a button. Kinda crazy, huh? We have a local bank, but for us keeping our savings far away from our checking accounts helps them remain untouched.

Saving for multiple purposes? Go ahead and open more savings accounts. It’s easy to look at a lump sum and think that it’s a lot of money, but if you separate it out into categories, then you’ll know exactly where you stand on each item that you’re saving for.

Does anyone have any banking tips that I’m overlooking? Or better yet is anyone having any luck with higher risk investments? We’d love to hear about it.

So, what sparked this frantic urge to save? We’ve been talking about buying a house for awhile now but we’re so far away from it that it seemed unnecessary to start an actual fund. That is, until I found the perfect house. Well, almost perfect. It’s too big, it’s in a city that Peter and I would probably never move to, and the price is a little high but everything it stands for is perfect. Here’s a little peak:

It’s just SO beautiful. This may not be our house but our dream house is really kicking us in the butts to start that house fund (which I’m happy to say that I did–right between pining over this house and pining over it some more).

Images courtesy of Realtor.com