If you recently purchased a home, here’s another one of those small things you can do before the year comes to an end.

When it comes to organizing your real estate documents, you should keep a hard copy, a copy saved on a hard drive, and a copy saved in a secured cloud file. These files can be broken into four categories.

The Transaction

When you close on your property, you should ask your Realtor to send you a complete set of all the documents pertaining to your transaction. This would include the purchase contract and addenda, disclosure statement, condo documents and your closing documents from escrow.

If you purchased a home that belongs to an association, it’ll probably be in your best interest to print out a hard copy of the house rules too. You should keep a copy of the house rules in your house.

Mortgage

At your escrow signing, your mortgage lender will also be present too. You will be signing a handful of documents pertaining to your mortgage. You will get a hard copy, but you should ask your mortgage lender to send you the documents in a PDF too.

To summarize all these documents, you should write down:

• Loan officer’s contact information

• Mortgage ID number

• Monthly payment amount

• Other important information

AOAO Property Management Company

If your home belongs to an association, you will probably have a monthly association and maintenance fee payment. Like organizing your mortgage documents, it’s important you write down:

• Property manager’s contact information

• Account ID number

• Monthly payment amount

Other

This section would include:

• Utilities

• Homeowners insurance

• Anything else that pertains to you being a homeowner.

When it comes to certain documents, like an old internet bill, you probably won’t need it. Ideally, you should only keep your most recent bills. If you’re disposing of any document, you actually should shred them.

-RO

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