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Q. How long should you keep your bank statements and checks? I have 25 years of accumulated stuff.

— Betty Krieg, Greensboro

 A. There are two basic approaches to this problem.

Let’s first explore the one that doesn’t involve a building permit.

Different people have different comfort zones when it comes to how long to keep records. It’s safe to say, though, that keeping a quarter-century’s worth of bank records goes well beyond what’s needed.

It might be interesting to see what a loaf of bread or a gallon of gas cost in 1984, but for any useful purposes, those records have outlived their shelf life. In fact, after 25 years, it’s quite possible they’ve outlived the shelf.

According to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, seven years is a reasonable maximum for how long you need to keep bank records.

So that immediately lops 18 years worth of records off of your collection.

But wait — we don’t have to stop there!

The FDIC recommends holding canceled checks related to tax records (such as for charitable contributions) for seven years. Checks or other records related to buying or selling a home should be kept indefinitely.

But there’s no need to keep any other checks for more than a year.

The same is true for bank statements. Keep any with relevance to taxes for seven years, ditch the rest after a year.

Other bank records can be ditched even more quickly. There’s no reason to keep deposit or ATM slips once you make sure the transaction has gone through as intended.

And that’s still not all!

If you have online records that duplicate the paper in your house, you might be able to get rid of even more.

Now, for those who like to keep meticulous records, it could be a little difficult to part with them.

But a question to ask is, have you ever had to dig back through decades and actually use any of these yellowing pages?

Of course, all this decluttering leaves another big question: What do you do with everything in that storage wing that’s been building up in the house?

Assuming a space launch is out of the question, we’ll look at the other option: shredding.

True, it’s unlikely that someone would want to dig though it all, but in the interest of safety (both in terms of protecting your identity and in dispensing advice in a newspaper column) it’s wiser to make financial confetti out of your records.

Be prepared, however: With records going back 25 years, this might be a full-time gig for a while.

Assuming you have 200 checks and other various statements a year, we’re looking at in the neighborhood of 5,000 documents in need of destruction.

I checked into shredding speeds. A typical shredder runs about 15 to 30 feet per minute, with most capable of eating several sheets at a time.

So, running the math ... um, that’s a lot of shredding.

Certainly it’s doable at home, but if you’d rather not spend so much time with the shredder that it shows up in your dreams, another alternative is a shredding service.

This can involve someone coming to your house with a cool-looking truck-based shredder that dices your documents as you watch.

So good luck and happy shredding!

— Jason Hardin