Identity theft is a multi-billion dollar industry that is used to finance organized crime. A Javelin Strategy report in 2012 found that identity theft increased 13 percent that year, affecting one in twenty Americans!

Just one or two pieces of personal information from your dump is all it takes to steal your identity.

Document shredding is a method used to destroy paper documents by cutting the paper into very small pieces. This is done to prevent identity theft and securely delete sensitive information.

We all get a lot of spam, from credit card applications and insurance packages to the 70-page retirement fund report from a job you left several years ago. Deciding what to keep and what to throw away isn’t really that difficult, yet many people get confused about it.

Once you know what to keep, you can shred everything else.

Depending on the type of documents, some must be stored for life, others for certain periods of time, some are converted to digital forms, and the rest can be thrown away.

For example, you must keep identification cards, business licenses, pension plan documents, marriage certificate, birth and death certificates, and social security cards for life. Obviously, these are very important roles and should never be thrown away.

Another category refers to materials that are kept for a specific period of time, either in paper format or as a scanned copy. This list includes tax records and receipts (keep for seven years), pay stubs and bank statements (keep for one year), medical records and bills (keep for at least one year after payment), and warranty documents and receipts (keep while you own the item).

This information gives you a good idea of ​​what to keep. Anything else you have can be safely shredded or thrown away.

The documents you need to shred typically contain personal information such as names, addresses, phone numbers, bank account information, or social security numbers.

So this category would include documents such as bills, credit card receipts, financial statements, business plans, forecasts, canceled checks, expired IDs, credit cards, visas, and passports.

Hire a company that offers a mobile paper shredding service

So now that you know what to shred, you can either do it yourself or you can hire a company that offers a mobile paper shredding service. You should choose the latter if you are a business owner, for example, and have a lot of material to shred.