This is a guest post from Mike of CleverDude. If you like what you see here, please consider subscribing to his RSS feed.

Back in college, I had one W-2 each year, no investments or additional income, and I just took the standard deduction. I didn’t really need to think about taxes until tax time came around. But now that I’m older, things are a bit different.

We still don’t have the craziest tax situation, but I do have at least a dozen different pieces of paper that have important numbers, not counting receipts. I run two businesses, and both my wife and I have day jobs. I’m not the best organizer, and it’s beginning to show. And that’s why I want to share a little tip with all of you this tax season. Begin filing your tax-related documents NOW rather than waiting till next year. [more]

Now that I have a Treo smartphone, I’ve been exploring ways to take advantage of having the internet in my pocket. Since I have a strong interest in personal finance, that seemed liked a logical starting point.

What follows is a list of ways you can use an internet-enabled phone to help you manage your money when you’re out and about. To be fair, some of these things can be done with a regular phone, or a simple PDA. That being said, a smartphone lets you combine all of this functionality into one handy little package. [more]

After an on-again-off-again relationship with a variety of different PDAs, ranging from a Handspring Visor to a Handspring Treo 90 to a Palm Tungsten E, I’ve finally decided to return to keeping track of my life on paper. Things are just so crazy in my life these days, and I’m far too visual to be able to keep track of things on a tiny LCD screen. I need to see my entire week laid out in front of me. So… I’ve reverted to my trusty Quo Vadis Trinote Weekly planner. This is actually a planner that I stumbled upon at a mall calendar kiosk shortly after New Year’s a number of years back. I picked it up for 50% off and rapidly fell in love with the format. The problem was that I couldn’t find refills for it. That is, I couldn’t find refills until I found TheDailyPlanner.com a couple of years ago. But now I can, and all is (once again) good in the world.

Well, I spent two or three hours this afternoon sorting through my e-mail inbox at work. It had somehow swollen to 678 (!) messages. I used to be in the habit of sorting out my inbox – filing, deleting, and and trimming things back down – every Friday (at worst), but I’ve recently let that slip. When combined with my apparent inability to delete even the simplest, most inane messages, it got ugly. And fast. I’m not done yet… I’ve still got about 50 messages left to handle, but it’s now back down to a manageable level. If I can find a few spare minutes this weekend, I’ll be back on top. While I was at it, I also got myself off of a few extraneous mailing lists. This won’t completely stem the tide, but it should at least slow things down just a bit.

Awhile back I picked up a fax machine, and I couldn’t be happier with my purchase. To be completely honest, I don’t send personal faxes all that often, and I almost never need to receive one. But when I do need to send a fax, there’s nothing better than dropping the form(s) to be faxed into the slot, punching in the number, and hitting that little green button. [more]