While I like the idea of a clutter-free life, it’s constant work for me to make even minor victories in the war on clutter.
One way that helps for me is a daily to-do item, which is to to find 3 pieces of paper to discard. For example, the other day I found a check that I had saved. The story behind this check is that some months ago a doctor’s office billed me for a payment. I used a bill paying service to pay. The bill paying service sent a physical check to the doctor’s office. Then the doctor’s office returned the check to me saying that this bill had already been paid. (Not sure how or why all this happened, but it did.)
The result was that I needed to have the bill paying service refund my money, since the doctor’s office didn’t need the check after all. I then contacted the bill paying service to ask them to put the money back in my account, which they said they would do. However, rather than immediately destroy the check, just in case there were any hiccups along the way with getting the bill paying service to refund my money, I saved the check. I wanted to have it to be able to prove that it hadn’t been cashed or deposited.
It was now several months later, and it was time to shred the check. Or was it? Had I been properly reimbursed? How to verify? I could log into my account associated with the bill paying service to look for a refund over the last several months. But that had the potential to be slow and tedious.
Then it occurred to me that I could use hledger. I noted that I would have categorized the refund as a medical expense. Specifically, it would be a negative expense that would have exactly canceled out the original expense of the payment via check. That was enough information to proceed.
The command I used was something along the lines of:
hledger areg medical
This showed me all the expenses categorized as medical. Because the negative amounts are shown in red, it was very easy to spot the reimbursement from the bill paying service.
The end of the story is that I was confident that I could get rid of the check now. One short hledger command sufficed to let me know that the check was now unneeded clutter.