Download your financial statements NOW

Financial statements in electronic form are now the norm.  But that doesn't mean that your bank will keep them around for long …

Our credit union's website just got a long-overdue face-lift.  This was a very good thing. “Hey, 2001 just called and they want their website back.”

The back-end of the website had been a bit newer than this (thankfully!) and we had gone to e-statements on our accounts a while back.  Pretty much every financial institution on the planet is all for electronic delivery of statements because it saves them a boatload of money.

Your electronic statements may be deleted sooner than you think

With the website overhaul that took place at our credit union, the e-statement interface also changed a bit.  One thing that changed was that the deletion date of each of the e-statements was front and center.

And I was a bit surprised how quickly they purged the files.  They delete them after two years.

To be fair, two years is adequate for most situations.  It easily covers the previous year for tax purposes, even with extensions.

And later if I really, really need to track down a statement, they're probably available … albeit for a price, per statement.  But that isn't a new development, or a new revenue stream for the financial institution.

Saving off your financial statements, now and moving forward

This is as good a time as any to grab what electronic statements you can.  If you're reading this around tax time, then it's a great time to do this!

Then, set up a system that makes it easy for you to grab them as you go.

1. Download whatever financial statements are available to you now, if you don't have them already.  If you've signed up for electronic delivery, then there's likely some archive of statements in your account area online.  Find them and get them, all of them.
2. Set an alert to be notified when there's a new statement.  These alerts may be baked in to your account already as part of electronic delivery, but if they're not, then enable email or text alerts in your account area.
3. Next best:  Set up a reminder to check each month, quarter, etc., for new statements.  In the unlikely case that there's no alerting mechanism available, create your own in your reminder system of choice (pen and paper to-do list, Todoist, etc.)
4. Download them as they become available.  Instead of just viewing the statements online, take the extra 9 seconds or so to save off the statement to the storage device of your choice.  Or, if you're a paper kind of person, print it off.
5. Back them up.  The epiphany I had this morning as I was staring at the deletion dates of my bank statements was that we are the ones ultimately responsible for making sure our financial records are available to us.  That financial institutions having generous archives of our financial reconrds available to us online is a courtesy, but not a requirement, and certainly not a right.

Save yourself some grief by getting control of your electronic financial statements!