I finally broke down and bought a shredder – mostly due to a growing stack of credit cards that I’d rather not just cut in half and throw in the trash.

The downside is that now after shredding roughly 20 cards, the kitchen smells vaguely of melting plastic.

The upside, of course, is that shredding things is kind of fun! 🙂

It’s funny that I’ve actually been putting off this purchase because we’re almost to the point where owning a personal shredder is kind of unnecessary. I used to have boxes full of old bills until we gradually switched over to paperless everything, and then I was lucky enough where they had a day at work where you could bring in whatever you want and they’d shred the whole thing at once, so that alone got rid of a bunch of my old school way of accounting.

In fact, between having this shredder and also one of these fancy, printer/scanner combos, I could probably stand to go through our file cabinet again and clear out another huge chunk of seemingly worthless paper. Considering that we don’t even print our tax returns anymore, it should mostly be W-2s and other crap that we still get via paper mail, and probably the original ginormous stack of documents that we signed when we bought our house … which I’m pretty sure I ended up getting PDFs of afterwards anyways.

Just think, if retailers would stop screwing around and consistently accept mobile payments, maybe we could see an end to plastic credit cards in our near future, too!