Fully cleaned out the filing cabinet!
Well, I cheated a little. My husband has a crate in the closet he uses for filing his teaching stuff, so I just stuck his papers in there (all of which were school related). I sorted through the rest of our papers, trashed a LOT, put a very few into Evernote, and put the remaining in my desk. Remaining folders are: previous year tax returns, current tax year, house sale documents, pet health records, very important receipts, career stuff (letters of rec, transcripts), and legal docs. Wish I could Evernote or trash more but they all seem like things I should probably keep actual physical copies of. The good news is everything feels much more accessible now, I hated digging through that filing cabinet.
Followup question: Do people actually use like security deposit boxes? Should I be keeping things like the deed to the house there? Because....I am not. A fire just seems so unlikely, and aren't there probably backups of everything with the relevant companies and government entities?
Next up is to address the overflowing Goodwill donation pile. I was sort of planning to wait until the next tax year because of my not-so-great documentation, but it seems like I am doing what I need to do to claim over $500 (basically just write down everything) -- from now on I'll start taking some pictures too. Hopefully that'll be enough, because I am getting super tired of everything still being in the house.