The Pareto Principle holds that, for many events, 80% of the effects can be attributed to 20% of the causes. Also known as “the 80/20 rule,” or “the law of the vital few,” the Pareto Principle has been found to apply to a surprisingly wide variety of things in everyday life.
Examples of the Pareto Principle
The [...]

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The idea of creating a paperless personal finance system has always appealed to me. Try as I might, I’m hopelessly behind on filing our mountains of paperwork, and I’d be hard-pressed to quickly lay my hands on a number of important documents.
While I realize that we won’t be able to go completely paper-free (e.g., what [...]

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Earlier this week, I ran across an excellent talk on time management by Randy Pausch. If you’re not familiar with Pausch, he’s a former Carnegie Mellon computer science professor who died of pancreatic cancer this past summer at the age of 47, leaving behind a wife and three young children.
Pausch delivered this talk just over [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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