Sheldon, Iowa — If your storage bins, bags, or wherever you keep your old records are running over, maybe it’s time to think about getting rid of some of those papers. And this Friday there might be a good opportunity for you.
Heidi Brown is executive vice president at Citizens State Bank in Sheldon, and she says they’re having a shredding event.
(as said) “Citizens State Bank has been hosting a community shred event as part of Community Banking Month in April, for the last, I believe this is our ninth year and we bring in a company called Shred It and they bring their truck right to our back parking lot and we offer our customers, the opportunity to bring us their shred in either garbage bags or a paper box that we dump out and hand back to you and we put it in the bin that goes up in the truck, and it is shredded right there for you immediately. And the reason that’s important is because we try — now more than ever — to stress the importance of, not just throwing your private personal information away in the trash, but actually shredding it and destroying it because your personal private information can be used by bad folks, scammers, people, you don’t want to be using it, so we want you to destroy it. And so as a customer community service, we bring the truck here.”
Brown says they’ll have the shredding folks in their back parking lot at Citizens State Bank from 1 to 3 p.m. this Friday.
She says different kinds of documents need to be kept for different amounts of time, and you should check with those familiar with what you’re getting rid of to see how long to keep it — but she gives us a good guideline.
(as said) “If it’s anything that you might use for tax purposes, you’re always encouraged to keep those things for seven years. Because if a person was going to be audited, seven years is the timeframe. Honestly for a lot of information… Seven years is the timeframe a bank is required to keep account information so that sort of a good rule of thumb… but again, it depends on what it is. If you’ve been someone who’s been the executor of someone’s estate or some different things, you may end up… find yourself with all kinds of paperwork that you don’t know what to do with. So it is dependent on what the information is, but that’s typically… And it also depends on whether or not you’ve got your information saved on a computer. If you’ve got it backed up on a computer, you don’t need to hold paper for seven years, you can shred it.”
Brown also says you don’t need to remove staples from the papers you want to shred. She says the equipment chews right through staples, no problem.
