I've never understood the value of "paperless" to the consumer. The benefit to the company is the savings of 3½¢ of postage and mailing expenses. But to the consumer...?

I pay my bills online, but I make sure I still get my statements by mail. I also balance my accounts from those statements each month, and every year I catch one or two errors, and they're almost always in favor of the banks.

Logically, I should be able to do the same thing by looking at my accounts online. But paper statements present the information in a different way than online, often to comply with laws about clear billing and communication. What's on paper sometimes very different from what's on the screen.

In Switzerland we luckily have a system where companies can send their bills directly into your eBanking system so they are all collected there. But if a company doesn't support that, it's much easier to keep the paper bill.

As a business it’s your duty to take care of your recordkeeping, print out the invoices if you so prefer.

Is this a weird american thing? At least here in the UK mortgage interest deductions are only applicable to businesses.

[1] https://www.irs.gov/publications/p936#:~:text=You%20can%20de....

It was, which is why your comment starting with "As a business" was so bizarrely off-topic.

> Is this a weird american thing? At least here in the UK mortgage interest deductions are only applicable to businesses.

Yes. American homeowners can under most circumstances treat their mortage interest payments as tax deductable.

What do you mean by off-topic? Businesses receive utility bills too, and might genuinely be required to keep records of those.

As far as I can tell, barring some very special circumstances, individuals never need to keep such records.

This is blatantly false. Unless paying taxes is a "very special circumstance."

People don't want these records at hand purely for their own amusement, which seems to be the assumption you're operating under here.

> This is blatantly false. Unless paying taxes is a "very special circumstance."

I’ve certainly never needed to pull up my utility bills while paying taxes as a private person.

It really feels like you’re just coming up with stuff, utility bills aren’t normally tax deductible (unless you are a business). There’s no reason you’d ever need them for the taxman any more than your grocery story receipts.

> In what situation will an individual need to supply their utility bills to the taxman during an audit?

The bills would be useful if they expensed some of those payments, deducted them, or whatever. With a record number of people working from home, some portion of those expenses might be tax deductible for some people, some people might receive reimbursements from an employer, etc.

(nobody said anything about an audit)

> I’ve certainly never needed to pull up my utility bills while paying taxes as a private person.

I think we can all agree that if you have never done this, it's unthinkable that anyone would ever do this.

(Way, way upthread jacquesm cited tax audits as a reason for these records to be physically provided, but they're a useful and common means of communication when employing a tax preparer or bookkeeper as well. And back to the original point, this is all even more likely to be true of an "old" person.)

The cost of saving paper records, for an individual, is fairly close to zero, whereas it's a colossal pain in the butt to track down stuff later. Make that mistake once and you won't do it again.

I think you are just repeating original comment here. Regular people in regular situations will never need their old utility bills for tax purposes.

Those choosing to e.g. run a business, pick up various extra responsibilities in doing so. In that case it’s absolutely your own responsibility to maintain good records, and you should print electronic invoices if you so desire.

If you run a business and are using your utility bills as a basis for deductions, you’d have to be stupid to not safely store them (digitally or physically).

Paper invoices should be opt-in, not opt-out. Very few people actually require them.

Under IRS rules, some people who WFH can often deduct part of their home expenses, including utilities.

See IRS Form 8891 line 21, labelled "Utilities"

What did matter in living memory (thus passed down to at least this generation) is that saving utility bills for 7 year can establish credit.

My parents still tell me to do this to this day, since that's how they were able to qualify for a home loan having not participated in the credit system otherwise.

Nowadays most such transactions are reported to a credit bureau, so they are either already on record or (almost?) no banks will care to see them.

My girlfriend just went though this process. She has no credit because she never got a CC and always saved up and paid for stuff like her car in cash. Over the winter she was looking to buy a house (didn't pan out for other reasons), and basically her only option was getting a loan manually underwritten. Part of that process was using a minimum of 2 years worth of bills as a replacement for a credit score. And the only loans available were several points more expensive than she could have gotten if she was able to do things the "normal" way.