When I purchase an expensive item, I find it fun (in a twisted kind of way) to calculate the per-use cost. Before my wife got her bike, my bike’s per-use cost was probably around $100 ($500 / 5 times I used it). Like most bike owners, I purchased it and never ended up riding much.

After I watched my wife ride her bike with her fancy shoes and pedals, it was clear that I was missing out. For some reason, someone forgot to tell me what makes biking fun… bike shoes with clip-in pedals. And by fun, I really mean easy.

The next weekend I purchased optical amplifierrent a car bulgariaлегламебелиSpecialized BG Comp MTB Shoes and Shimano PD-M520 MTB Pedalsкомпютри to add to my Specialized Hardrock Mountain Bike. The next day I rode my bike 30+ miles. Before that, my longest ride was 6 miles. The efficiency you can achieve by being able to pull the pedal up as well as push it down is incredible.

They’ve made biking so much fun that I now ride my bike instead of taking my car on short errands. So if you have an unused bike, or are buying a bike, definitely consider getting shoes and pedals.

One really slick way to use RetailMeNot is as a keyword bookmark in Firefox. It’s by far the fastest way to figure out if a site has a useful coupon code.

To set it up, go to Bookmarks –> Organize Bookmarks…. Then click on File –> New Bookmark… and enter the following:

Now, when you want to search for a coupon, you can just use the Location bar. For example, to find Amazon.com coupons, just enter “coupon amazon”. Coupon hunting can’t get easier than that.

Unfortunately, most financial sites are taking tonight off. All of the following institutions were completely or partially unavailable tonight:

• Washington Mutual
• HSBC Direct
• Fidelity Investments
• Vanguard

Twitter seems to have better uptime than most of the financial institutions. :) Guess I’ll be rebalancing another night…

Of course I can’t stop everyone, like my insurance company, from sending me tons of paper. BTW, why do insurance companies insist on sending so many pieces of paper? The top drawer in my filing cabinet is mostly insurance papers. Even though I can’t stop others from generating papers, at least I can stop printing payment confirmations, credit reports, statements, etc.

That led me to search for a PDF printer utility. First of all, what’s a PDF? PDF stands for Portable Document Format. One cool thing about PDFs is that they can digitally capture what you would have printed. After you “print,” you just load up the file in Adobe Acrobat Reader, and can view what looks like a printout.

After a little searching I finally ran across a really nice (free) Windows utility, CutePDF Writer, which acts like a printer and saves the print out to a PDF file.

So now when I print something, I see the following:

After I hit Print, I just enter a filename for the PDF and it saves it. No more paper, no more filing.

Here are some suggestions for getting the most out of printing to PDFs with CutePDF:

• Make CutePDF your default printer. This way you’ll generally error on the side of saving to a PDF rather than physically printing.
• Keep a consistent folder and file naming convention. I’ve created a set of folders, such was Credit Reports, Order Confirmations, Rebates, etc. Also, I’ve named my files like this: “20070519 words about the file.pdf.” That first number is the date, and by putting the date in that order (year, month, day) my file names sort nicely by date.
• Back up your PDFs. Make sure that you back up your documents using whatever method you prefer (ex. burn a CD, copy them to a flash drive, copy them to another computer, etc.).

So far this system has worked out great.

• “Filing” is instant since it happens when I choose a folder and filename. No more paper documents waiting to be filed.
• It’s easy to find documents by browsing files or searching.
• There’s no need to buy lots of paper and printer ink.
• My office space is cleaner and there is less unnecessary clutter (there’s still a lot though :))

Yeah, I’ll admit, it’s not that paperless office they’ve been talking about for years, but it has certainly saved me time and hassle.

krunk4ever was a major contributor to the Consumerist thread and summarized his stance on rebates nicely:

• Read all of the fine print
• Include all of the necessary fields
• Document and make photocopies of everything (I like to file this away and check that I’ve received them every once in a while.)
• Know which rebate companies are good (he comments on some in the article)
• Follow-up when necessary

• Instantly calculates a student’s eligibility for federation student aid, including grants
• Reduces the time it will take to complete the FAFSA
• Simplifies the financial aid process for students and their families

This tool is definitely a step in the right direction. When I applied for financial aid (seems like ages ago), there was no way to predict how much aid you would receive. With this tool, you can be better prepared and more realistic in your financial planning for college. If you try it out, let me know whether you think it was helpful.

Your 2006 return will have told you if you were too high or too low. Optimally you set your deductions so that when tax time comes around next year you owe $0. Also, don’t forget that you might need to pay estimated taxes during 2007 (especially if you have have income that does not automatically take out taxes).