Rather a mundane question for you, Dave: I have huge stacks of financial documents from my Dad’s estate and need to figure out the easiest way to shred them. What’s your recommendation?
This post brought to you by Fellowes, Inc. . All opinions are 100% mine.
My initial response to your question is “deliver them to a commercial paper shredding company” but those can be quite expensive and I’m a do-it-yourself sort of guy, so instead I suggest you check out the cool new Fellowes AutoMax paper shredder.
I have a Fellows shredder in my office already – in fact, I produced a video review of it a while back: Dave Reviews the Fellowes 73Ci paper shredder — and it’s a workhorse, easily shredding old CDs, credit cards and, of course, stacks of paper.
Problem is, you have to manually feed the paper into the shredder. Works fine for a dozen or two sheets of post-tax-prep documents, but if I were facing a few hundred sheets, or a dozen spiral notebooks! full of paper, that’d be daunting.
Enter the really cool Fellowes AutoMax shredder. You’ll immediately understand why this is a great match for you from this product photo:
Yup, you drop everything you need shredded into the drawer, up to 500 sheets at a time (it’s a big unit), and it cross-shreds everything, leaving you with mulch in the bottom drawer, ready to be recycled.
To be fair, this isn’t a $100 shredder you can pick up at CostCo — the retail on the units is closer to $950 — but if you want to make sure every sheet of your father’s estate is destroyed (or you work at an office where people don’t have time to stand at the shredder to destroy 30+ sheets of paper at a time) then this can be a tremendous time saver.
Specs reveal that it can “Continuously shreds 500 sheets into 5/32″x 1-1/2″ cross-cut particles”, which also helps avoid the amazing scene in the film Argo where children tedious reassemble shredded photos to identify the Americans who had worked at the embassy in Tehran. In case that’s an issue, I mean. 🙂
Both the AutoMax systems also include SureFeed Technology that ensures the feed keeps chugging along whether you’re putting in thin or thick sheets, their JamGuard System that prevents jams (my 73Ci has this too, and it’s neat to watch the unit auto-reverse then auto-proceed back and forth until it unjams itself) and SmartLock, that stops the drawer from being opened once it’s started shredding, protecting confidential information from peolpe who might filch a few pages.
If you’re facing the prospect of shredding huge numbers of documents or work in an office where document confidentiality is critically important, I encourage you to check out the Fellowes AutoMax shredder line, currently the 300c and 500c units. Available through Amazon.com and other major retailers.