Identify theft is a multi-billion dollar industry that is used for the funding of organized crime. A report from Javelin Strategy in 2012 found identify theft rose 13 percent that year, affecting one in every twenty Americans!

Merely one or two pieces of personal information from your trash can are all that is required to steal your identity.

Document shredding is a method used to destroy paper documents by cutting the paper into very small pieces. This is done to prevent identity theft and safely dispose of confidential information.

We all get a lot of junk mail, from credit card applications and insurance packets to the 70-page retirement fund report from an occupation that you left several years ago. Deciding what to keep and what to trash is actually not that difficult, yet many people get confused by it.

Once you know what to keep, you can shred everything else.

Depending on the type of documents, some must be stored for life, others for certain periods of time, some are converted into digital forms, and the remaining can be thrown away.

For example, you must keep ID cards, business licenses, pension plan documents, a marriage certificate, birth and death certificates, and social security cards, for life. Obviously these are very important papers and should never be discarded.

Another category concerns materials that are kept for a specified period of time either in paper format or as a scanned copy. This list includes tax records and receipts (keep for seven years), pay stubs and bank statements (keep for a year), medical records and bills (keep at least a year after payment), and warranty documents and receipts (keep as long as you own the item).

This information gives you a good idea of what to keep. Everything else you have you can safely shred or throw away.

The documents you need to shred normally contain personal information like names, addresses, phone numbers, bank account information, or social security numbers.

So this category would include documents like bills, credit card receipts, financial statements, business plans, forecasts, canceled checks, expired IDs, credit cards, visas, and passports.