Last week, I wrote about my decision to try to move all my documents to electronic format. I've spent the last week converting some of them. Luckily, several of the companies I deal with provide access to electronic statements online, even if you had not signed up for them in the past. This means I was able to download, for example, the last 10 years of my brokerage statements from Charles Schwab. That saved me a lot of scanning. For the things I couldn't download, I have slowly been scanning documents. I've gotten through about one and a half drawers of my 4 drawer file cabinet. Here's a picture of the documents I've converted to electronic form so far:
In case you can't read it, that's a tape measure hanging off the pile. It's showing the stack is 9 inches tall. I just waved my trusty scanner at the pile and Reducio! Gone! Now I've got lots of shredding to do.
My online backup has also been proceeding over the past week. It's currently backed up about 60% of the 50 GB of data I have selected. (Since I have unlimited storage, I selected others things to back up besides the electronic documents I am creating, such as my photos and MP3s.) Once this initial backup has finished, subsequent backups will be almost instantaneous.
In real estate-related news, it would seem the market in California, or at least one part of Calfornia, is recovering. The property I made hard money loan #11 against is finished being rehabbed and is now on the market. It was put up for sale on a Monday. By Saturday, the seller had received seven offers at or above the list price! We figured it would sell for $700,000, but it looks like the seller may be able to get $725,000 for it. If the seller accepts an offer and all goes well with escrow, the loan should be paid off by mid-June.
I also finally got everything all finished in setting up my self-directed IRA. I opened a bank account for the LLC yesterday. Now I just have to wait 1 week for the bank to release the hold on my deposit check and I'll be able to start hard money lending with my IRA!
2 comments:
Hi Shaun - I subscribe to your blog and am always very happy to read about when you are successful and eager to learn when things don't go your way.
One thing I do when scanning large amounts of documents (like when I digitized my info) is scan as many as possible all at once. It goes into a single file, which I open in Adobe Acrobat. From there I separate extract each page or series of pages into a file and save it in the proper location. I don't know if this is any faster. It feels faster... Good luck!
-v
Thanks for the kind words.
I tend to scan papers into PDFs they way I plan on storing them. I figure the less times I have to have to work on the same document, the better. And the program I am using to create PDFs, remembers the last filename I used, so since I am scanning things in chronological order, I typically only have to change 1 or 2 characters in the filename with each document save.
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