Managing your moolah

Budget

When it comes to managing my money, I’ve been through various phases. I tried purchasing a budget book to record our daily expenses with the idea that I would diligently record our expenses in it every night – until Mr. Procrastinator caught up with me and the receipts started piling up and my bedside drawer became the filing cabinet for all my receipts. I then experimented with online tools – Excel being the simplest no-nonsense solution. It definitely automated the process to some extent but still required me to collect receipts until I could find the time to record them in my worksheet.

I’ve now been playing with Mint.com. It’s my latest tool of choice and hopefully one that I’m going to stick with for long. It automatically retrieves your expense items from your bank accounts including your credit card purchases and categorizes them so you can easily track where your spending those hard-earned greens. It makes budgetting a lot of fun with all the cool graphics and charts that you get with it. The web site has a fabulous Web 2.0ish design which makes it a truly enjoyable experience. Plus it recommends money saving tips, compares interest rates and offers you more competitive deals for making the most out of your investment.

 

I know what you’re thinking – security ! Mint’s web site claims that they don’t store any usernames and passwords plus they test their systems against hackers and ensure that they meet web security standards.

My verdict : Great tool ! Simple to use ! Love it !

Great place to showcase kid’s art projects

Met a real nice lady at one of my Business Intelligence classes I took last week. She told me about this great web site – Artsonia.com. It’s a great place to showcase your kid’s art projects – I’m sure I’m not the only one who heaves a sigh everytime my 6 year old brings me one more of her hand-made works of art with “I love you mom” scribbled across. She looks at me innocently and exclaims “Are you going to keep it ?” and I go “Of course !” and I do – in my bedside table drawer that’s almost about to explode with paper. Until one fine day during one of my cleaning sprees, I take all that paper and put it away in a bigger box this time and then in my annual spring cleaning season, (gulp) all that paper is trashed. Yes..I’m a bad bad mom.

So here is the solution to all those other bad moms out there – Artsonia – what a great idea ! Take those art projects, capture them on your digital camera and share them with your family and friends. Or better still, make T-shirts, aprons and other memorabilia out of them to permanently capture those memories. Great idea !

“Checkpoint-friendly” laptop bags !

Finally – now why didn’t anyone think of this earlier.

After having to juggle with removing your shoes, jacket, keys, wallet, belt, coins, rings, implants and of course, laptops from your bags, we can finally save ourselves the last step – this article featuted in the NY TImes announces that we finally are going to have TSA approved checkpoint-friendly laptop bags.

Phew ! Now if they can only come up with something for our shoes ??

What is this blog about ?

My first time blogging and I’m already checking off resolution # 1 – Post frequently ! And here I am with my second post today !

Okay so let me tell you what this blog is about ? After much deliberation I finally have it ! I’m a mom of two now..a new mom actually (the labor pains still very vivid from just about a month ago) and I’m always looking for ways to become more organized at home, to make life simpler…simple simple simple. But it just seems that the more technology and gadgets we have out there makes life more difficult. So that’s the subject of this blog – MOMS SURVIVAL TOOLS AND TIPS !

…and here is my new munchkin – born 8 pounds !!

Hello World :)

Greetings and “Hello World” ! While I’m not new to the blogging world I’m one of those “wannabe I’ll get to it someday” bloggers. I guess when it came to blogging I was awaiting some kind of epiphany….that the heavens would open up someday and tell me what I must blog about. Instead I decided to dive in offering the little tidbits of information I could share with the Web world.

So a little about me..I’m a female (if you didn’t figure that already from the title of this blog) who is kind of a ‘Jane-of-all’ (female version of Jack-of-all..get it ?) when it comes to technology. I’m interested in a litte of this and a little of that – Business Intelligence, Web Development, Design, Databases and now of course, the buzzword these days – Sharepoint !

I’m still looking to establish my niche when it comes to technology and in fact wonder if I’m one of the few people who couldn’t consider myself an expert in any one technology since I wear so many hats at my current job. Maybe that’s a good place to start ? Anyone ? Is it better to be a specialist in one or two technologies or a generalist (like yours truly). Feel free to comment !

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