Keeping financial account statements

I'm cleaning out my file drawers, and I discovered that I stopped getting paper statements for our primary financial account (which includes a CMA, IRA, SEP, and 529 plan) back in 2007, and I neglected to actively download the PDF statements thereafter, figuring that I can always look at them online. However, when I log into my account, it only lets me go back as far as 2012 to download the statements, which means I'm now missing a little over 4 years' worth of statements.

In culling the file drawer, I had made a decision to keep only the December statement of each year anyway, so I'm missing 5 years' worth of December statements. Should I care about this and see if my financial advisor can somehow drum up copies of these statements? I have all the year-end tax reporting statements, so that aspect is not a concern, it's just more of a history of all our sub-accounts.

And is it a mistake to toss all the intermediary statements from every month? Going forward, should I download all the monthly statements, or just the last one of each year as a rolling summary?



If you can download every month, you might as well. It doesn't require a lot of storage. The question is whether you can afford the time. I do it. I might do it every three or four months, but when I do it, I catch up with all the statements I've missed.


Thanks, Tom. It's not a huge time commitment, just more file clutter on my computer, but I suppose in the scheme of things, it's a lot better than drawers full of paper.


At the risk of sounding extremely stupid, what is the reason for keeping all of the statements? Why would you need to go back and refer to a statement from years ago?


if that happens,then you download them or request them from the institution. I don't save anything like that anymore since it can be accessed on line.


max_weisenfeld said:

IRS audit comes to mind.

True... but if the OP has the tax reporting statements, would you need more than that? 


I was really thinking along the lines of a historical view of how our finances have changed over time.

Regarding any tax/audit concerns, the tax reporting statements would be sufficient for investment gains/income, but they don't reflect how new money came into the account, and for that, the December monthly statements alone would not be sufficient as it doesn't summarize the year, just shows the net result at the end of the year. However, my financial advisor said that typically an audit looks back at only the last 2-3 years, and he can always retrieve records much farther back if need be, so I'm not going to worry about it.


jasper, I use dropbox to keep the statements, since I use so many computers/devices throughout the day and week, and I want the statements accessible to most of them. I probably don't need to, but I have a separate folder (under dropbox) for each account. Then I name the statements something like s-2016-01. It's important to put the year before the month and the month before the date, because when the computer sorts the files by names, the oldest statements come up on top and the newest on the bottom (or vice versa). Some banks use the stupid American notation like 01-17-2016 or even worse January-17-2016, so I change the names when I download.


Thanks, Tom. I do the same regarding the dates, though happily enough, BofA does the dates the smart way already.

For the investment accounts, I downloaded the December statements from the last few years, and that should be sufficient for just a broad historical overview. The rest of the statements are accessible for long enough on their site should I need to go back for some reason.

Since only a years' worth of Visa statements are available online, I just downloaded the last 12 months' worth of those e-statements, switched to online statements only, and put the last 12 months' worth of paper statements in the shredding pile. I'll keep the prior three years' worth of paper statements for now, and shred them over time once I'm sure I no longer care how I spent my money.

All I can say is I have about 20 lbs. of paper to shred, and I'll be happy to see it gone.


We use Quicken, so all our income and expenditures are entered there, separated by account, categorized and notated in just about every way I can think of. Is there some reason I should be saving PDFs of my statements in addition to that?



In order to add a comment – you must Join this community – Click here to do so.