How to Pick the Best Paper Shredder Under $100

When it comes to working from home, or just dealing with the paper aspects of your daily life, a paper shredder is a must have.  For some strange reason, I have been through a ton of paper shredders, and destroyed many of them in my wake.

best paper shredder under $100 guide

Today I’m going to review the best paper shredders you can buy under $100.  I have found through my experience and research that this is a great price point for both value and performance.

Why Do You Need A Paper Shredder?

First things first, why do you need a paper shredder?  Like I said, this is one of those things that everyone should own.

The main reason you need a paper shredder is to protect yourself from things like identity theft.  You should never throw out anything with information that can be used to personally identify you – this includes your address!  

Everything with your name, address, and phone number should be shredded, not thrown away.

Anything with an account number or balance should also be shredded, not thrown away.

Basically, anything that can be used to identify you, or that you wouldn’t want the whole world seeing should be shredded, not thrown away.

Picking the Best Paper Shredder Under $100

There are many things to look at when picking the best paper shredder, such as size, shapes, and aesthetics.  Paper shredders are not small, and may become a permanent fixture in your home office or office area.

There are three important things to be concerned about when picking your paper shredder besides these features.  The fist thing is how many sheets of paper you can shred at at time.  Go above this, and you will find your shredder jamming.

This is the most important thing to consider for the performance of your shredder.  I will be sure to call out how many sheets each shredder can handle in this list.

The next thing is how does the paper get shredded.  There are two main ways here, cross cuts or paper shreds.  From a security prospective, cross cut is ideal since it renders the document completely useless.

If you are just shredding into strips of paper, theoretically someone can still reconstruct the document.

We are only going to look at cross cut shredders in our list.

Finally, we must consider the run time.  Shredders are a mechanical device, and require a cool down after a certain period of use.  The shredders in this list range from a three minute to a 10 minute runtime before they will need to cool down.

Now, let’s take a look at some paper shredders.

Best Paper Shredder Under $100

When it comes to the best paper shredder, there are many things to consider. First of course is what it looks like and how big it is, but it is also important to take a look at how many pages it can shred at once, and what kind of shredding mechanism it uses.

We won't look at antyhing that makes those annoying long paper strips - there are more secure methods out there for shredding sensitive documents. We will only be looking at cross cut and above shredders.

Finally, it is important to know how long your shredder can run before it needs to cool down. We will also clearly let you know how long this is for each and every shredder.

That's why we are going to take a detailed look at these paper shredders in plain english to help you find the best one.

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Tips For Using a Paper Shredder 

It an be easy to let your shredding get backed up!

Make sure you find a couple of minutes each week to spend shredding those sensitive documents.

Designate a bag or bin as your destination for what needs to be shredded, and simply shred the contents once it fills up.

Don’t try put too many things into the paper shredder at one time, or it may lock up or overhead.  Neither of these mean the end of paper shredder, it just may need a little break.

When shredding credit cards, shred a single credit card at a time to prevent jamming.

Be careful when emptying the shredder bin, or you may have a paper shredding disaster on your hands!  I have noticed both young children and cats tend to really enjoy playing with those shreds.

The best paper shredder under $100 will serve you well for all of your document destroying needs.  Remember, if you don’t want the whole world to see it, it should go into the shredder!

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