Should a person keep their work check stubs forever?

Question

If not,how far back{months-years-etc.}should a person keep them in their personal records?

Answer 1

If your pay stubs show year-to-date totals, keep them at least until the next payday and verify the totals.  If they don't show year-to-date totals, keep them to the end of the year and verify the totals against your W-2.  Once the totals are verified, feel free to shred them and discard them.

Personally I keep all of my pay stubs and have most of them going back nearly 40 years.  They make for an interesting historical reference.  I pulled an old military LES (equivalent of a pay stub) from 1977 and was amazed to see that I actually was able to support a family of 3 on a $292 paycheck every 15 days.  That wouldn't pay my gasoline bill today.

Answer 2

I say keep them for how ever long you want to keep them. I only hold on to them for the year then I shred them so no one could get all my personal info from them.I say keep them for the year then shred them so no one gets the info like your social security number clock number and name.You can also get a little book and put the company name and how much you made an hour what gross pay and net pay are and keep it that book and hide it. Just remember if you throw them out shred them before you do to prevent idenity theft,hopefully this helps.It has for me.

Answer 3

I keep the end of year paystub that matches to the W-2.  (I also keep the paycheck after each raise.)  I shred the rest.

I do this mainly because I vaguely remember what I made for a total salary and the numbers won't match exactly since I max out all benefits.

The other reason to keep that paystub is that it that until recent years, the common W-2 was impact printed and tended to fade.  And, until recent years, one didn't get the annual SSA earnings history, so you wouldn't know until you retired that some income hadn't made it all the way to the SSA records.