What Documents Should You Be Shredding? One Major Rule to Remember

So you are staring at a pile of papers, old mail, old bank statements, bills, etc, all that were from the days before you went to 'online' or digital statements. What do you do? Can you toss them or do you need to shred them?

What Do You Need to Shred?

According to AARP, there are a few things that you will need to shred. You can take the time to read that article, if you think about it,  there is one major rule to follow. If there is a paper that has your address or an account number on it, you should shred it. This could be anything from pre-approved credit card offers that you get in the mail, bank statements, bills, medical statements, and old insurance statements.

Have you heard horror stories from a friend or from a news story that shared with you info about how someone got their identity stolen? You probably have, while it is too bad for your friend, you might want to take some precautions for yourself. If you have any old credit cards, ID cards or even old expired drivers licenses, you will want to shred those as well. If a crook were able to get ahold of those items, they could potentially do some damage to your identity as well as your credit.

Should You Shred Your Old Credit Cards?

Speaking of your credit, use that shredder machine (if it is capable of doing it) to shred your credit cards. I remember my parents cutting up their credit cards when they would get the new one, that is a good habit to get into as well.

One last thing you might want to shred, is anything that contains a password for a website or an account that you don't want anyone to have access to. Yes, it seems like you probably already know that, but I know someone that recently got hacked, so it does happen to real people.