# Do you folks hang on to older books and magazines (at least investment-related?)



## canabiz (Apr 4, 2009)

*Do you folks hang on to older personal finance stuff (books, mags, statements etc)*

So I have stacks of older issues of Money Sense and Canadian Business as well as various investment books that I collected when I first started getting serious about my personal finance. This includes different *For Dummies* titles as well as the Derek Foster ones, just to name a few. 

I was holding on to them in case I need to quickly refer to a particular subject (typical hoarding symptoms lol?) but truth be told, I have not given any of them a second look. With the popularity of e-books and the vast amount of info available on the Internet (or at your local library), I am thinking of dumping them all to de-clutter the house and by dumping i mean donating these books to the local library or giving them away via freecycle or kijiji. 

Are you in the same boat? Do you hang on to books and magazines from days gone by or do you go by what is current and keep it light and simple?

P.S: I have expanded this thread to include other personal finance materials outside of tax receipts such as mutual fund statements, pay stubs etc.


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## Kim (Jan 10, 2011)

Yep I have 5 yrs worth of Barrel Horse News stacked on a shelf - I sometimes check back for stats that they printed. Rarely do I go back and read whole issues but we spend a lot of time on the road during the summer months and I have gotten into the habit of grabbing 2 or 3 to re read instead of having the laptop on in the truck ( hard to read / type anyway ). All my other horse magazines get checked over and interesting write ups cut out and put in my "binder". Then the magazines go to recycling. 

I have subscriptions to BHN and McLeans and buy the odd magazine from time to time. Have on my to do list to get Money Sense but am hoping to buy it through a school fundraiser or something like that.


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## brad (May 22, 2009)

Over the years I've whittled down my magazine subscriptions to just one (Granta), and that one comes out only four times per year. I don't even keep most of those, except for a few that I know I will want to reread (and I do reread them periodically); interestingly enough in one of my old Grantas I stumbled across a profile of the writer Bruce Chatwin by Michael Ignatieff back when Ignatieff was a journalist.

I've gotten rid of 70% of my books and nearly all my old magazines, just kept a few that were "keepers." I do have a few e-books and lots of PDFs of practical how-to articles from online magazines and newspapers.

I used to save all books and magazines because I figured I'd read them again someday, but as the decades clicked by and I didn't look at most of them again, I got rid of them. There's always the library, and now there's always the Internet.


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## HaroldCrump (Jun 10, 2009)

I do hang on to old books and magazine, and in fact, I love them!
However, they are not investment related.

The books are mostly the classics and some childhood favorites like the Bobbsey Twins series, Enid Blyton, an old copy of Mill on the Floss, Jane Austen's works, pretty much all of the original Agatha Christie's published by Harper Collins and later Bentham books.
As for magazines, I only have the Reader's Digest from many years ago, back when it used to be a real magazine rather than a populist, advertisement filled tabloid.

A do have a couple of books on financial statement analysis that will be keepers for many years.
But most investing books and magazines I read are borrowed from the local library, read, filtered and retained in memory, and returned.
I figure that if I really have to refer back to a particular book, it's only a phone call away.


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## Four Pillars (Apr 5, 2009)

I used to keep magazines like BusinessWeek around for "reference", but like you - I rarely, used them. 

Unless you keep some sort of index which will tell you which magazine, certain articles are in - it's pretty difficult to find what you are looking for in a stack of magazines.

And as others have said - between the library and the internet, it's easier to look there first.

One suggestion if you find an article that you want to keep, is to just scan it and email it to yourself (or however you like to store electronic docs). These might never get read either, but at least they aren't a fire hazard.


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## slacker (Mar 8, 2010)

I made the expensive mistake of keeping my university text books instead of selling them immediately after each term ends. The fact of the matter is, if you want to go back to reference the material, the prices of those text books would have dropped dramatically, so you could just go buy it back at a later time for a much lower price.

I once bought a text book for $125, and 4 months later, found a used copy (looks brand new to me) for 50 cents.


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## brad (May 22, 2009)

slacker said:


> The fact of the matter is, if you want to go back to reference the material, the prices of those text books would have dropped dramatically, so you could just go buy it back at a later time for a much lower price.


Not to mention the fact that knowledge progresses and old textbooks on most topics go out of date quickly. When I was clearing out my book collection a few years back I discovered I had hung on to my old genetics textbook from 1978. Apart from the historical descriptions of Mendel's work, much of the information in that book is long obsolete.


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## canabiz (Apr 4, 2009)

I just donated a big box full of books and magazines to the Friends of the Ottawa Public Library. I made sure the books are clear of any personal stuff and I scratched out my name and address on the magazines' cover.

http://www.ottawapubliclibraryfriends.ca/en/page/home

They have a big annual used book sale this weekend so I hope my stuff will be useful to certain folks.

I have expanded this thread to include other personal finance materials such as pay-stubs, mutual funds statements, credit card statements...IMO, the only stuff worth keeping is tax-related statements and receipts, your stock share certificates, insurance policies and credit reports.

Anything else can be disposed of or shredded. If there is a compelling reason why you keep any of the aforementioned, I am sure we are all ears.


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## slacker (Mar 8, 2010)

Well my field is fairly static. Unless they figured out a fast way to do integer factorization or prove that P = NP, or to do comparison based sorting faster than O(nlogn) ....


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## MarkUncorked (Apr 11, 2011)

Of course. I have at least a couple years of Forbes sitting in the bathroom, much to the chagrin of my wife!


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## kcowan (Jul 1, 2010)

I keep 2 years of Consumer Reports but I seldom refer to them.


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## brad (May 22, 2009)

kcowan said:


> I keep 2 years of Consumer Reports but I seldom refer to them.


This is where online access is worthwhile. I dunno if Consumer Reports does this, but the French-language equivalent publication, Protegez-Vous, allows you full access to their archives if you maintain an online subscription. So I subscribe online to Protegez-Vous and use the site whenever I want to research something I'm planning to buy, plus I read some of the articles online each month. I figure the subscription pays for itself in terms of avoiding bad purchases.


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## Berubeland (Sep 6, 2009)

I keep some old series of books that make me happy. I got most of them questing though Value Village and Sally Anne. 

My family loves those place and I keep telling them that you can use coupons and shop at Old Navy and save money (kinda scary) so they make me take them shopping there and I throw a book or two into the cart every time I go. 

Through the years, I've accumulated many series of books that are out of print this way. Don't even talk to me about Amazon used books most of them charge $20 for shipping a $2 book. 

I have the Battlefield Earth Decalogy, and most of Isaac Asimov's books, and the entire Dune Series. These books are old friends to me and as much as I read online today I get into these introspective periods where I'll just sit on the couch and rip through the entire Dune series in a couple days. 

Oh and in case anyone has Sherri S Tepper's book Raising The Stones it's out of print, and I'm just desperate to get my hands on one. I've been looking for that particular book for over 5 years now. 

I do have an ebook reader too but most of these old books haven't been converted yet.


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