Box of crap

Today, I decided that I was going to clean out this box of crap:

That box has a bunch of receipts, unpaid bills, paid bills, magazine clippings, paperwork, coupons, wedding invitations, uncashed checks, blank checks, stamps, W-2 forms, business cards, seed packets, post-it notes, index cards, pens, folders, switch plates and other stuff in it. I decided that, as best I could, each item would be touched once, and dealt with as best I could. Some items I wouldn't be able to deal with immediately (say, a Cheesecake Factory coupon, or a car title), but, for the most part, I would be able to handle each piece of paper.

The bills, they were the easiest items to deal with. I wrote checks for the ones I needed to write. I signed the paperwork that needed to be signed (scanning a copy for myself). I put what needed to be put into the mail. I piled up the business paperwork into one pile to talk to Katie about soon. The box is less full, but not empty.

Yet.

This is going to take more than just today, I think.

One of the items near the top of the box was a magazine page I had pulled out of the magazine. I do that with articles of some import, and with pages that have something interesting on them, something that I should remember or take action on. This particular page had this suggestion on it:

The suggestion was to sign up and use mint.com to track where purchases were going. mint.com also categorizes purchases into groups, to offer suggestions on where to cut expenses to save money.

Now, I'm not particularly excited about giving login information for financial sites to third party sites. However, I've heard enough good news about mint.com that I thought I'd have a go. Created a mint.com account, logged in, went to import my data.

Failure.

Tried again.

Failure.

Tried again.

Failure.

Went over to my banking site to see if the three failed attempts would have locked me out of my account, too. It didn't, and the username and password information I was typing into mint.com was accurate.

Okay, I give up. Maybe it's a scam. Time to change the password on my accounts.

Sigh.

Still have the rest of that crap to go through, too.