Which records should I keep for myself?

Four pages in this library are about a record you will want later and do not have yet. The print button is a PDF editor is the confirmation page with the reference number on it. Get the voicemail out of the phone is the message you have decided to keep. Write down every address you have lived at is the form that wants ten years of moves and jobs. Read the ticket before you pay it is the envelope you could make disappear by mail tonight. Each is about keeping your own copy of something, and each carries a line about what not to keep, or where not to send it.

Change the destination from your printer to Save as PDF. The print button is a PDF editor says people meet the print dialogue as the thing that appears before paper comes out, and it is also, on every computer made this decade, a small free document tool that no one ever introduced you to. Four things it does, in rough order of how often you will want them. Keep the thing before it disappears: booking confirmations, order pages, appointment details, the page with the reference number on it, printed to a PDF, are yours permanently in a file rather than an email that will be somewhere in a pile in two years on a website that will have been redesigned; the page calls this the version worth building a habit around, four seconds at a moment when you are already looking at the page. Strip an article down to the article, because the print preview does much of what a reader mode does. Take pages out of a document: open the PDF in a browser, set a page range in the print dialogue, and save the result, which is the thing people install software for; on a Mac the viewer already on the machine will merge, split, rotate and reorder pages from its thumbnail sidebar. The fourth is the part the people who do this professionally were firmest about: when you use an online converter, the free sites that merge, split or convert a PDF in your browser, you are uploading the document to somebody else’s computer, which for a train timetable is fine and for an employment contract, a medical letter, a tenancy agreement, anything covered by a confidentiality agreement at work, or anything with your bank details in it is a decision rather than a convenience. The methods on the page all run on your own machine, and the page says that is most of why they are worth learning. One way it quietly fails: some print-to-PDF paths produce a picture of the text rather than the text, so check by opening the result and trying to select a word. And the page adds that the security on a PDF is not much of a security; if a file matters that much, the protection is not sending it.

A voicemail is usually stored by the phone company, not inside your phone. Get the voicemail out of the phone says the save button is not saying what you think it is: on most phones a voicemail sits on the phone company’s system and your phone is only playing it to you from there, which is why people lose them without doing anything wrong, when the number is given up, the account closes, the carrier changes, or the old phone goes in for the upgrade. Getting the copy out is usually small: open the message and look for a share or forward option, which on most phones sends the recording as an ordinary audio file you can email to yourself; for an old phone that predates all of that, one person’s route was a cable from the headphone socket to a computer’s microphone input; if even that fails, ask the phone company, because some can send a saved message as a file on request. Then make a second copy in a different place, because one copy is one accident and this is a file you do not get to download again. The page says plainly that you do not have to listen to it to save it: saving and listening are separate acts, and only the first one is urgent. For someone still here, the people who lost someone’s recorded words have one consistent instruction: get a recording while it costs nothing, call and let it go to voicemail, or better, tell them you want a recording of them and record on purpose, because laws about recording a live call without consent differ by country and by state, and a message someone leaves you is different in kind. Several people described the same discovery, that the sound of how someone speaks fades from memory sooner than a face does. Whether keeping a dead person’s recorded message helps or hurts is split four accounts to four on that page, and its note carries one practical asymmetry: a saved message can always be deleted later and a deleted one usually cannot be brought back, so if you are undecided, saving keeps both choices open and you never have to press play.

Write down every address, with dates, and keep the identity numbers out of the file. Write down every address you have lived at says eight separate conversations, the widest agreement in its set, keep a written record of every place they have lived with the month and year they moved in and out, because that is what background checks and financial applications ask for and it is exactly what slips the memory; four accounts say a five- or ten-year history defeated them. Six conversations keep the employers alongside, exact dates, the company’s address and contact details, and two write a short paragraph under each role so the list doubles as the master copy every future résumé is cut from. The rule that makes it work, from two conversations: update it whenever you move or change jobs. If you never kept one, the rebuild is a one-time job from the places that kept it for you: six separate conversations found their whole history in the saved shipping addresses of an online shopping account, three in the free credit report, which the page checked is available in the US, two in old utility bills, and single accounts in old leases, expired driving licences, a phone’s location timeline and old tax forms; five cautions say none of those is permanent, so pull the dates out and keep the list. Who asks for this is argued three accounts to three and four to three, invasive against standard, and the accounts’ decider is whether the role needs a clearance or a badge; the strictest case is the US federal clearance questionnaire, ten years with a person who knew you at each address, and one account says the whole habit is mostly an American one. Then the page’s loudest caution, two contraindications and five cautions rated high: a single document holding addresses, employers, dates and, worst, identity numbers or scanned documents is an identity-theft kit if it leaks, and two accounts say automated scanners look for exactly that file. Three accounts want it in an encrypted app with a second factor, three want it on paper in a drawer, and the page’s own position is to keep the list itself wherever you will actually maintain it and keep identity numbers, licence scans and account details out of it entirely. One caution the page turns into a refusal: an account suggested inventing a plausible address where the paperwork is lost, and a caution rated high answers that incorrect information removes you from consideration and histories that disagree can stop a check passing; write ‘unknown, roughly that spring’ instead, which the page marks as its own line.

Read every field on the ticket before you pay it. Read the ticket before you pay it says three single accounts in its conversations say the same thing about a parking ticket: check the plate number against your own car before you pay, because people move their own tickets onto other cars, and two accounts in one note and two in another say they have seen it done. One account says check the street name, the date and the description of the car as well, because three accounts in one note say reversed digits and wrong states are ordinary; the page says the reading is not a defence but the check that the ticket is yours and correct before any money moves. Three separate conversations say the long cost of a ticket is the insurance premium, which can outweigh the fine, and that whatever you do should be aimed at keeping the violation off your record; one account says a plea to reckless driving raised their premiums for years, and one contraindication says do not plead to it if the long-term cost matters to you. Three separate conversations say a first-time offender with a clean record who appears in person, not by mail, often comes away with a reduced fine, a dismissal, or a plea to something not reported to insurers, and two say the court can cost you more than the fine once fees and a day’s wages are added; the accounts’ decider is your driving history, the fine against your wages, and what the particular court is known to offer, which its own website or clerk will tell you before the day. The page carries what two jurisdictions publish: California’s court self-help pages list paying, traffic school, fixing a fix-it ticket, a trial including one by written declaration, and, for anyone who cannot pay, more time, a lower amount, a payment plan or community service; the United Kingdom’s page says the minimum for speeding is a £100 fine and three points, that a speed awareness course may be offered instead if you have not been on one in three years, and that twelve points in three years means disqualification. The radar question, when was the gun last calibrated, is the tactic those conversations began with, and four corrections take it apart: technicians calibrate the equipment, judges have convicted with the gun admitted uncalibrated, many courts take an officer’s visual estimate as expert evidence, and in at least one state the paperwork is in the officer’s hand before you ask. A private car-park notice is a different creature with different law, and the plate check applies to those most of all.

Who these pages are not for. The print page is not a workaround for a site asking you to pay for what you are reading, because somebody wrote the thing, and it says a proper reader is the better tool past a few hundred pages. The voicemail page is not for everyone, and the people it is not for are not grieving wrongly: some found a recording kept the wound open, and for them the page says a written record, texts, emails, a card in their handwriting, may be the kinder object, holding the person without playing them aloud. The addresses page says readers outside the US and Canada should look at their own forms before keeping anything, and that for a gap that cannot be documented, a stretch of homelessness, a sofa, an employer that no longer exists, its conversations had no answer beyond one account who says clearance investigators are used to human lives if you can say where you were. The ticket page says that if the ticket is for causing serious harm or a death, none of it applies and a lawyer does, that it does not carry a script for the roadside moment with an officer, and that outside California and the United Kingdom the two pages it could read are not yours.