# Online Financial Records



## SPLAbby (Oct 11, 2014)

Online Financial Records	

I am the trustee of my parents' trust and it is coming to a close. When I opened a checking account for the trust, the bank told me to go paperless, that everything I would ever need would be online. The bank knew it was a trust account.

Well, I recently told the bank I will be closing the account sometime soon and asked if there were any special considerations. Only one. (A very big one) 

When I close the account, I lose all access to the records associated with the account. I lose any audit trails I was counting on the bank providing. Part of that is the monthly statements, which you could argue I should have been printing myself anyway. (Then why did I go paperless?) And an even greater catch is I will no longer be able to view check images. Banks don't want to give you back the actual cancelled checks anymore. They charge for that service. But if you ever need to see a check to prove who it went to, the images are unavailable after you close your account.

So.... I have been busy printing (and saving to disk) statements. And requesting check images online, one at a time, for me to pull up, print, and save to my hard drive (and then to DVD).

If I hadn't gone paperless, I would already have these dosuments filed neatly away in my trust files. 

I don't know how this works if you have an account at an investment company. I have not closed any accounts that I had gone paperless on. This may be true for any account for any kind of business you deal with. Paperless does not always save trees. It can just switch who is paying for the trees to be cut down.

Regarding printing the online statements -- I could have just downloaded each one in a PDF file to save until later. But I also printed it to be sure the PDF file was readable. (Or I could have printed it without saving the PDF file, but ink on paper fades.) So I did both.


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