Junk Mail Phobia

Hello my name is Annie and I am a junk mail phobic. There I said it. Yesterday I started working on the pile of mail...or should I say mountain of mail that I have accumulated. Before you judge me you have to understand my process. I pick up the mail, bring it into the house dump it in a basket sitting on top of my dryer and forget about it. I hate it, I hate everything about mail. I have at least come to grips with separating it into 2 separate piles. Obvious bills and the rest. So for the most part I am paying my bills on time, but in the past when the phobia was really out of control I would be scrambling to get a payment in on time because of my fear.

Yesterday was the day to deal with the mail...it is still scattered in piles around my lovely living room today. I came face to face with the fear within me...junk mail. You see I can't just toss it, because I also have a fear of identity theft so I have to open it and shred all pieces that have my name on them. When I finally decide to deal with the pile, I am usually faced with a mountain, as I was yesterday. I realized I had not dealt with the junk mail pile since Dec. and I couldn't see the top of my dryer. It included tons of catalogs... of which I have to rip my name off the back page and shred.

I ended up with a garbage sack of toss able mail, a half a sack of things that need to be shredded and several separate piles that need to be filed, the bill pile and a check from Bend Parks and Rec for a class that was cancelled.

Now here comes the plan. I am going to put my big girl panties on and every time I pick up the mail, before I dump it in the basket I am going to deal with the junk mail immediately. That way the mail will actually fit in the basket.

This way when I acutally have to do our taxes I can find where that darn W2 ended up. The good side of dealing with a pile of junk mail yesterday was that I noticed there are substantially less credit card aps.