For me personally, my wife is an immigrant so a paper trail is important. Before that though, I think there was a time where companies didn't email out the reco

For me personally, my wife is an immigrant so a paper trail is important. Before that though, I think there was a time where companies didn't email out the records, so they'd keep the records for a year or two and then you would lose access to them, but the IRS wants several years if you get audited. Nowadays though, if it wasn't for my personal situation then I probably would have switched to saving off a digital record.