My Decluttering Journey Part 3

I am quite paranoid when it comes to disposing of items that contain personal information: bank statements, credit card bills, and medical test results, among many others. And yes, I see a bit of the irony that I write a blog and share a lot of information about myself while being this paranoid. That said, in this blog, I get to choose what I share and what I don't share inwhat I write, and it's that choice that makes the difference in my opinion haha. In any case, it is for this reason that I purchased a shredder many years ago, so I could efficiently tear up pieces of paper that I felt contained information that shouldn't be made available to others. Unfortunately, as I was about to use it, I realized it wasn't working anymore. Ugh! So I decided I had to purchase a new one. I didn't need a fancy, high-tech one so I just got the least expensive one I could find from Office Warehouse. 

My new shredder

The thing is, I have so many sheets of paper to get rid of. There are credit card statements from credit cards I no longer have, such as AIG, Metrobank, and my company Amex and Caltex cards. I also have old checks that were processed by the bank; apparently, my bank used to return to me via snail mail all the checks I wrote that had been successfully claimed and I still had them all. I also kept all these BDO bill payment slips for bills payments I made through BDO, such as my AIG and Eastwest Bank credit card which had a payment option through BDO. This was, of course, prior to the ease of paying online bills through Gcash. Still, I somehow never tossed out any of these slips and I amassed a ton of them over the decades. Then there are all the bank statements since my bank used to send me a physical copy of my statement regularly.

I also decided to get rid of almost all of my physical bills. After all, almost all entities now send billing statements electronically. I also just realized I still had physical bills of service providers I stopped using ages ago, specifically Destiny Cable and Bayantel. Finally, I also decided to shred all my work documents that I somehow still have, such as printed-out training materials and notes I've taken. I guess I'm really taking to heart all those company privacy rules that say that confidential company information should not be shared to anyone outside the company.

The interesting thing is, I'm so paranoid about this that even when I throw out all these shredded strips of paper, I still take an extra, unnecessary step: I separate each batch into a different bag and I toss them out into the garbage on different days. I really don't need to do this because it's not like there's anyone out there who plans on piecing together my trash like they do in the movies, when someone is trying to uncover secrets that have been shredded. I'm not really that important haha. Still, this is the process I've established for myself and I'm sticking to it hehe.

Shredding results

I'm nowhere near done because I don't want to overburden my shredder with too many sheets on any given day because the motor might conk out so I have a limit on the amount of papers I shred on any given day. That said, I have gone through maybe half of my stack now. Great progress!