After I retired last year, I resolved to complete household projects I didn’t have time to tackle when I was working full-time. I’m not alone in this regard: One of my friends spent his first week of retirement cleaning out his garage. I don’t have a garage, but I have a file cabinet that contains almost as many documents as the National Archives, so I spent a recent snowy afternoon going through old tax returns and other financial ephemera.
I used to believe it was a good idea to hold on to a copy of your tax return forever, because it’s a useful snapshot of your financial situation at different stages of your life. But once you hit retirement age, keeping tax returns from your twenties and thirties can become unwieldy, and it’s unlikely you — or the IRS — will need to see 30-year-old mortgage interest documents or 1099 forms.
