At Credit.com I wrote about my recent purchase of a cross-cut shredder to replace my crappy strip-cut shredder.
In an age when identity thieves are on the lookout for personally identifiable information, we need to be all the more careful about storing and discarding our sensitive documents. I've written here before about my decision to go paperless. I accomplished this with three tools:
1. A scanner. I got the Fujitsu ScanSnap S1500 sheetfed document scanner, which is a fantastic device that I've come to depend on every day since I put it on my desk in the spring of 2010.
2. A digitized document storage-and-retrieval system. I store my scanned documents in Evernote, which performs optical character recognition scans on the documents I save to it, making it easy to find any document I'm looking for almost instantaneously. (The free version does not offer text-recognition, but the premium version is only $(removed) a month and lets you upload a gigabyte of data every month.)
3. A shredder. Of course, going paperless means getting rid of the original paper documents. Until recently, I've been using a cheap strip-cut shredder, which cuts paper documents into long, thin strips. I wasn't happy with this particular inexpensive strip-cut shredder, though, because it bogs down when I feed it more than six sheets of paper, and it comes to a grinding halt when I try to shred a credit card or a document with a staple in it. The shredder was the weak link in my paperless system.
