I personally have many books with me at the moment.  You could say this is a holdover from recently graduating from college, but I say its hording.  Seriously though I have about fifteen books in a stack of ‘to read’ and about thirty in the ‘read’ pile.  This doesn’t include the boxes of books I have stored in other places.  So, I need to cut down.

Why not sell, give away, or ‘lose’ any book you’ve already read?

This is a simple post for today, but I plan to sell any book I have read recently (on ebay).  Each one that doesn’t sell will be given away BookCrossing style.  If you don’t know what Book Crossing is, check this out.  Really, I’d rather ‘release’ books this way, but I need to fund the bookcrossing effort (buy nice tags) so I’ll be selling the books at first till I make around seventy dollars, then the rest will be freed!  What do you do with your read books?  I’m interested to know what people do with books they may want for reference in the future, like Plato’s Republic, or computer manuals.

This is of course till I get a Kindle… Any kind souls out there?

Okay, I use a thousand social networks all the time for no real particular reason.  But Twitter is one I use regularly even though my friend base happens to be quite small at the moment… I’m okay with that.  Anyway, to put it simply Twitter as my main network creates a streamlined work process.  I only have one thing to update regularly.  You could argue that getting rid of all of them would be best, however I know my presence on the web will always exist, why not 0wn 1t?

Anyway…

For those who don’t know what I’m talking about, the video HERE is by far the best explanation I can find.

Okay, once again, how is this simplifying?

Well, simplifying can also be seen as gaining control of yourself.  If you’re all over the place, how can you focus on the single task at hand?  Well, Twitter is very… VERY simple and updates everyone I care about!  Why not?

Okay, it’s not that drastic, many of the posts this week have been a little on the easy side.  But stay tuned, up ahead comes the real nasty tasks!

And if you want to follow me on Twitter, Feel Free!

I have an account at Wells Fargo, Home State Bank, and Paypal - a loan through AES, credit cards through Chase, Wells Fargo, and Paypal as well as student loans from Sallie Mae and New Mexico Student Loans.  The amount of debt I have may be inconsequentially high (as with any debt)… but I think it’s more of a distress to have so many accounts.  I mean, do I really need three checking accounts, three credit cards, and three loans? (albeit entertaining group of threes, I don’t believe its necessary).

Starting today, I’m consolidating my finances, working on fiscal responsibility, and streamlining my financial future.

Budgets and The Like

For me, budgets are very difficult to stick to.  Its also difficult checking multiple websites for my finances.  So really quick, here’s the software I use like a checkbook.  Its simple, free, open source, and wonderful!  I love this program, plus it’s cross-platform so I could use it on my mac, a PC, or Linux.

Loans, Credit Cards, and Consolidation

This is simple, I’m consolidating everything together into a single loan.  Today I’m searching through different companies, and the best way to do this.  It looks as though a local bank-backed solution may be best.  I would always recommend this for the customer service!  So New Mexico Student Loans it may be.  I’ll check back with updates at the end of the week!

Savings(es) and Checkings(es)

As of right now, I have a Home State Bank account (for my hometown, if I need to exchange money with any of my family members), a Paypal account (for internet reasons), and a Wells Fargo account (for depositing while I’m in Santa Fe).  This list may seem ultra-long, but each has its own simple task.  Here, sadly, I can’t think of any special way to simplify other than to keep a solid understanding of each purpose… On top of that, I’ll actually be adding another account.  This time, I’ll have a savings account through ING Direct.  I’m doing this for a simple purpose:

As I’ve been suggested, adding 50 dollars to a savings account every paycheck (effectively ‘paying yourself’ before bills), I’ll grow a wonderful account… slowly… but it’ll still grow!

Why ING Direct?  mainly because of this post at Get Rich Slowly, as well as a few others on the site.  From here, my finances will be simple through use of Buddi (my finance software of choice!).  Now its time to pay off that debt and turn it into investments and savings!

If you have any other special Savings and Checking suggestions, feel free to comment. I’d love to hear!

Business cards, they work as an introduction.  No matter how paperless I call myself, business introductions smooth more easily with the exchange of cards with basic information.  So today I’m using Moocards.com to create new business cards as one of the few items to go in my bags for NYC.

The Cool Thing about Moocards

More specifically I’ll be ordering minicards from Moo.com with some of my designs on the back.  These cards are smaller than normal business cards, but will definitely catch the eye of the recipient.  If you’re in an artistic field, I recommend them heavily!  You can upload your own designs, use photos from flickr, or choose from lots of pre-designed cards.  These are really cool.

I’ll report back upon receiving my first shipment of moocards!

A difficult thought I’ve had recently: Can it be possible to get things done without scheduling free time?  I mean, this feels a little counter-intuitive.  I guess you could just set up a schedule to include everything but free time.  This inevitably creates sections of free time in your schedule though.  It seems a little inevitable if you’re scheduling anything at all.  Then there’s the issue of over-scheduling.  Where can there be a middle ground?  Well, something I once heard called zero planning.

Zero Planning: An attempt to schedule blocks of ‘required’ ‘flexible’ and ‘very flexible’ within a calendar.

Sunbird!

For my calendar, I use Sunbird, an open source program that allows for the ability to create multiple calendars.  In here there are multiple calendars grouped by shared tasks.  For instance I have a ‘Screen’ calendar for my day job, an ‘0wn1t’ calendar for this blog, ‘Personal Projects’ calendar for projects and so on.

ZeroPlanned…

In order to create ‘required’ ‘flexible’ and ‘very flexible’ I used a color scheme and attached these separate calendars to colors within their respective scheme.  the ‘Screen’ and ‘Personal’ calendars being the most important and set-in-stone, deserved greyscaled schemes, the ‘0wn1t’ and ‘Education’ calendars are shades of green for their flexibility, and ‘Personal Projects’ fits into a blue, very flexible standpoint.

But what about free time?

The free time I griped about earlier represents much more easily in a ‘zero planned’ calendar.  Any gap between times counts as free time, and any blue area has a high possibility of being free time, and green areas become free time every once in a while.

Basically anywhere there’s color or whitespace, free time exists!