Identity theft is a multi-billion dollar industry used to finance organized crime. A 2012 Javelin Strategy report found that identity theft increased 13 percent that year, affecting one in every twenty Americans!

Just one or two pieces of personal information from your trash can is all that is required to steal your identity.

Document shredding is a method used to destroy paper documents by cutting the paper into very small pieces. This is done to prevent identity theft and securely delete confidential information.

We all get a lot of junk mail, from credit card applications and insurance packages to the 70-page retirement fund report from an occupation he left several years ago. Deciding what to keep and what to throw away is actually not that difficult, but many people get confused by it.

Once you know what to keep, you can shred everything else.

Depending on the type of documents, some must be stored for life, others for certain periods of time, some become digital forms, and the rest can be thrown away.

For example, you should keep identification cards, business licenses, pension plan documents, a marriage certificate, birth and death certificates, and social security cards for life. Obviously these are very important jobs and should never be discarded.

Another category refers to materials that are kept for a specific period of time, either on paper or as a scanned copy. This list includes tax records and receipts (keep them for seven years), pay stubs and bank statements (keep them for one year), medical records and bills (keep them for at least one year after payment), and guarantee documents and receipts (keep them as long as you are the owner of the item).

This information gives you a good idea of ​​what to keep. Everything else you have can be safely shredded or thrown away.

The documents that you need to shred typically contain personal information such as names, addresses, phone numbers, bank account information, or social security numbers.

So this category would include documents like invoices, credit card receipts, financial statements, business plans, forecasts, canceled checks, expired IDs, credit cards, visas, and passports.

Hire a company that offers a mobile paper shredding service

So now that you know what to shred, you can either do it yourself or you can hire a company that offers a mobile paper shredding service. You should choose the latter if you are a business owner, for example, and have a lot of material to shred.