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The world is abuzz about the pending iPad and it’s pre-orders. Everyone is talking about the Microsoft Courier. You love your iPhone/Droid/Blackberry. You constantly search around for bigger, better devices that will do almost everything in the world. In this “buy-buy-buy” haze, have you forgotten the love for your laptop?
A laptop is a versatile tool. When people talk about user experience on new gadgets, they distract people from an important point – you already know how to use a laptop. A laptop can fit in a small bag and go anywhere you want it to. It’s never as flashy or as impressive as one of these new gadgets, but are you just paying for the flashiness? The status? Aren’t we over that in this country?
Over the past few years of developing into the Nerd that you see before you today, I learned how to push a laptop to do almost anything. It boasts an impressive array of features that we’ve all forgotten about. Today, I want to remind you of all the things your laptop can do, and hopefully inspire some of you to hang on to that relic instead of swiping that credit card for another gadget purchase, or dipping into your hard-earned savings. But first, here are the specs on my laptop, so that you know I’m not talking about some super-laptop that you can’t afford:
This is a dual-core, 1.60GHz Toshiba Satellite laptop with 1.5GB of RAM. It has an 80GB hard drive. I bought it with Vista and downgraded to XP about a year and a half later. This setup cost me about $700 when I bought it in 2007, and a quick search on Newegg.com pops up a computer with twice as much memory and a hard drive FOUR times as large as mine for under $400. Honestly, this computer blows mine out of the water, and it cost almost half as much as I paid for mine.
So here’s the list, in absolutely no particular order. I sat down and jotted down all the things I can use my laptop for, so this is a “stream of consciousness”-type list. A quick editor’s note: I’m not dumb. This list assumes moderate maintenance (i.e., running CCleaner about once a week, having a free antivirus application running at all times), Windows XP (though you don’t need XP for most of this stuff), and a decent internet connection.
It’s the flashiest feature of them all right now – read books on a screen! The iPad will have books! Well, you don’t need to buy a new gadget for this necessarily. Barnes And Noble and Amazon both offer free software for reading books on your computer, so if you want to buy ebooks, go right ahead! Better yet, visit Project Guternberg and download over 100,000 free ebooks from the public domain if you want.
This is probably the feature I use the least, since you can’t compare the ease on the eyes of a book compared to an LCD screen. This is one place I think the iPad will fail, and why, if you’re a heavy reader, I actually would recommend getting a dedicated e-reader. The e-ink technology is much, much easier on the eyes.
I’ve written at length about how you can use your computer as your television, and even hook it up to your TV. But also, for quick show-watching on the go, just visit a site like Hulu. I subscribe to a lot of shows within Hulu and they post to my queue the morning after they air. So, all I need to do is log in, go to my queue, and click “Play”. Boom.
If you’re looking to watch live sports, start getting to know TVAnts and StreamTorrent. Plus, this method ensures that you get out-of-market games, too.
You hardcore gamers looking to play graphics-intensive games will probably want a powerful desktop, but laptops can handle quite a bit too. Plus, if you’re a casual gamer (like myself), you are just looking for simple games to pass the time, in which case, there are plenty of great gaming sites out there like this one.
Miss college? Want to learn a new skill? There are lots of great places online to see and hear lectures and lessons taught by fine professors from all over the country. Looking for something a little more fun? Learn guitar (see link above) or build something cool at Instructables. There are endless possibilities for what you can learn through your laptop.
When I go to my grandmother’s house, looking through pictures involves emptying a cabinet full of old albums and sitting at the kitchen table while everyone crowds around them and tries to see what’s going on. Nowadays, all those pictures (and more!) can be stored on your laptop. Back them up to a site like Picasa (my favorite) and tag, organize, and share them with everyone forever.
Bonus tip: set your screensaver to pull pictures from the folder on your computer where you keep all your photos, and your monitor becomes an instant digital photo frame when not in use.
Talk radio, comedy stations, music of all types and genres – internet radio is fantastic. Set up a Pandora station for customized listening goodness, or listen to hundreds of live radio stations on iheartradio.com. Take it with you.
The local version of the previous tip. Imagine: no CD towers to buy, no cases to spend half an hour opening. Download music from iTunes or Zune Marketplace or Amazon. Store them on your computer (and back them up, of course). Rip your current CD collection and then pack away those discs in a bin somewhere. You can listen to any music at any time, anywhere. It’s a beautiful thing.
It doesn’t matter if you are biking, running, or driving a car – sometimes you just need directions. Now, you can type in any location or address into sites like Google Maps or MapQuest and you know exactly how to get anywhere. You no longer have a need for a big paper map that takes up half the front of the car. Just search, print, and move on.
If you want a laugh, look at my notes from high school and college: they’re messy and smudged (I’m a lefty), completely disorganized, and a total failure. Today, with services like Evernote, you can organize and tag your notes, and they won’t be smudged or unreadable. Heck, you can even just use a word processor to get the job done if you want. Just pull your laptop out of its bag and get to typing.
Remember how embarrassing it was to go to a bookstore or a library and pick up one of those stupid “For Dummies” books? Now, you don’t need them. I’m amazed they’re still on the shelves at all. There is no longer an excuse for not knowing something. You can Google it, you can Bing it, you can even Ask Jeeves if you want. Get your plumbing/cooking/health questions answered just by typing your question into a search engine. For facts (mostly accurate), hit up Wikipedia.
I use Google Calendar, but you can use whatever you want. All the things going on in your life can be chronicled, and you can have reminders sent to you straight from your calendar. Stop missing those anniversaries/birthdays/whatever.
My mom kept an address book for years. When I needed a phone number, I needed to go to the closet, pull it out, flip to the section with the first letter of their last name, navigate through old, crossed-out addresses and skim through until I found what I was looking for. Now? I just sit at my laptop, open up Google Contacts, and use the search box to find the entry with the person I’m looking for. You can use Outlook or something else if you want. But have a backup of all your contacts, and you can search them easily at any time.
Hop on Weather.com and enter in your zip code at the top of the page – severe weather warnings, detailed forecasts of the next couple of days, and extended 10-day forecasts all come up. You can watch the live radar if you want. Do this stuff for monitoring the weather of your next vacation destination. Turn off the Weather Channel and put down the newspaper.
Ever notice how you don’t see presentations done with big poster boards anymore? That’s because you just need to load that PowerPoint presentation and plug your laptop into a projector. It looks slicker, makes you look good, and was easy to do with your laptop.
Wave “bye-bye” to adding and subtracting errors. A complete money management system can be had on any laptop. Need to share it with your husband/wife? Use a free online service like ClearCheckbook or share a Google Doc. The math and tracking is done for you – all you need to do is enter in those transactions.
VoIP technology continues to advance. I run a Skype phone line with a little headset for business. Want to video chat with somebody like you see in the movies? Get a cheap little webcam and you can all you want. I used to video chat weekly with my then-girlfriend while she was in Taiwan. You can now talk to somebody and see them, regardless of where they are. Powerful stuff.
High school reunions are becoming obsolete with sites like Facebook. We all know what we are doing, all the time. That’s lame sometimes, but it comes in handy. For example, I have friends all over the country, and I can stay a part of their lives through my communications on Facebook. When done correctly, Facebook can enhance your personal relationships, and you can share joys, sorrows, and laughs with people every day.
Here’s where the fun starts! Do you miss the Super Nintendo? How about classic Nintendo? Sega Genesis? Hop over to your favorite search engine and type in “SNES emulators” to find a program that will play old Super Nintendo games. Download it, then search for “SNES roms” to find and download the games. Plug in a USB controller and you’ll feel like you’re 8 years old all over again!
Whether you do it in an RSS feed reader or you just visit a site like CNN or MSN, the headlines are always updating and keep you in the loop at all times. Hit up ESPN for live scores of all of your games. Then, cancel your newspaper subscription. I mean, like, NOW.
When I cook, I just put the laptop on the kitchen counter. I don’t need a shelf of cookbooks (although I do still have a few). You can store recipes in Evernote or use a service like Supercook to manage your inventory of recipes. It makes your cooking life a lot easier, and you never have to remember which recipe book that breaded chicken recipe was in.
DailyMile lets you map and save your runs. DailyBurn allows you the ability to track any type of workout, and even track your nutrition levels. You don’t need to keep a paper notebook or print out a spreadsheet. Type it in, submit it, and move on with your life. Slick, slick, slick.
Build a website, run a blog, connect on Facebook/Twitter, design brochures, write copy… the list goes on. Take notes during your meetings with clients. A laptop computer offers the flexibility to work anywhere you choose, provided your business can pay those bills. A laptop, in my opinion, is an absolutely essential tool for business-building today.
I remember back in 2000 when I first learned how to burn a CD. It took forever. Now, I use CDBurnerXP, but you can use just about anything. Put those home movies on a DVD. Make that mix CD for your friend (or that girl you like). It only takes a couple of minutes, and you can do it right from your laptop.
XBox Media Center, now on the original XBox, PCs, Macs, and Linux machines. All your movies and music on any TV in your house, from your computer.
Again, another invention that I am shocked is still on shelves: the portable DVD player. Instead, play this stuff on your laptop when sitting on the plane or when you’re supposed to be paying attention in class. Chances are, your laptop can handle any kind of DVD, too.
Google Tasks or Remember The Milk, or about a dozen others. Ditch the paper to-do list and type it up in your laptop. Want to keep it simpler? Open up a little Notepad document and bang out your list.
I’ve always been a big fan of WebMD, but there are other ways to get medical questions answered, too. This is not a substitute for a doctor’s visit, of course, but it can help you diagnose minor situations instead of paying that co-pay to be told those lumps on your throat are just leftover food scraps. [Note: this is not a good tip for hypochondriacs.]
Want to buy anything? Put your shoes down. Stay in your pajamas. Open up your laptop and get to Amazon. Search for whatever you want, and they’ll have it. Oh, and it’ll be cheaper, too.
Okay, so some of these are obvious, but it helps to have them here. Your laptop is a remarkably strong piece of technology. I would think twice before you ditch it to use some fancy-looking thing that only does two or three things on this list.
What do you use your laptop for?
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I used to run cross country. For seven years, I embarked on 5-10 mile runs. On good days, they wore me out but I had fun. On bad days, I felt like I was dying slowly and painfully.
Races were held weekly in high school. They were 5K races, or 3.1 miles to those of you not familiar with the ol’ metric system. I’d be smack in the middle of it, and I would have no idea where the finish line was. I was so focused on how tired I was that I couldn’t get my head wrapped around where I was in the race. As a result, my performance absolutely sucked. Ask my coach: despite three years in high school cross country, I never really reached my potential. I couldn’t get my head into the psychological aspect of it.
And those of you who are going to respond with “Why didn’t you just run faster?” have never been in a race like that.
When you don’t know where the finish line is, you can’t run the race very well. Financially, you need to be working towards something. If your goal is to just kinda be good with money, you will never make it. Just like if your dieting plan is to lose a bunch of weight, you’ll stay fat forever.
It’s all about making smart goals, and one of them is to make it very, very clear. Here are some examples:
Now we’re talking! These are goals – and depending on your financial situation, they are clear, attainable ones. Having a clear goal gives you something to focus on. Once all your energy goes toward that goal, great things can happen.
My fiancé and I have so far nailed every goal we’ve set out to attain in the last two months. Now, the big one: paying for our wedding and honeymoon in cash. It’s lofty but achievable. Two and a half months ago, we would have just resolved to keep it as cheap as possible. You know what would have happened? We would have had a $25,000 wedding and financed the crap out of it and would take 5 years to pay it off.
Without any clear direction, you just kinda flounder around. Once we set our financial goals and set out to pay this thing in cash, our financial world shifted a little bit.
It’s the biggest part of any budget – what do you want yours to accomplish?
I’m sitting in my cold apartment, eating yet another lunch of Ramen Noodles. I’m 5 pounds lighter than I probably should be, and my jeans have a big hole in the knee. I climb into my car with one burnt-out headlight and pray the gas will hold out until tomorrow. After seeing how much food I can squeeze out of ten dollars, I return home to hop on the computer and I breathe a sigh of relief.
“Oh good,” I think to myself. “My credit card payment cleared on time.”
Anybody else see what’s wrong with this picture?
This isn’t really that much of an exaggeration, either. Last fall and in the beginning of last winter, this was my life. And you know, it’s actually a portrait of a lot of lives. Today, I’m a couple pounds heavier (it takes a while for me to gain weight – sorry, ladies), my gas tank is full, and my cupboards are far from bare. That’s because the first thing my fiancé and I figured out in our budget was The Four Walls.
Dave Ramsey teaches The Four Walls as the basic needs for living – no matter what, these things need to be covered:
Now, you notice he doesn’t say:
Sure, those things are nice, but they’re not basics. For food, you need ingredients for a healthy diet. That means you need to start cooking. Go to Amazon and type in “cooking for beginners” and you’ll get a ton of books that will teach you how to apply heat to food and watch a timer. That’s really all there is to cooking. Heck, my chicken recipe for this week consists of spreading mayo on chicken breast, rolling it in bread crumbs, and putting it in the oven for a little while. And it is some of the tastiest chicken I’ve ever made! Don’t overwhelm yourself at the thought of having to cook. Remember, this is for your health and well-being.
For shelter, find a modest space that you can live in for a while. It may mean having to downgrade a little bit – a smaller space, maybe a place that doesn’t have an on-site gym or pool. Included in there is money to keep the lights and the heat going. This is for the comfort and well-being of you and your family. This could even mean selling your house and renting for a while. It might suck, but it might be necessary if you are struggling to make ends meet. Let’s be realistic about what you can afford. Don’t choose a living space based on emotion.
For clothing, make sure you’re not naked and you’re dressed appropriately for the climate and occasion. Simple stuff.
And for transportation, let’s keep gas in the tank every week and have a modest car that will get you to and from work. Something that runs.
I do listen to Dave Ramsey’s radio show on my Sansa Clip every day, and he gets a lot of calls from hysterical people drowning in debt. To calm them down, he says, “Okay, let’s budget this out – start with the basics” and he walks them through the Four Walls. At the end of it, the person has stopped crying and he says something like, “See? Life seems a little less scary when you know you’re going to eat and keep the lights on, doesn’t it?”
We learned in grade school what the basics to living were. Yet, somehow, in our Spend-Spend-Spend culture, we’ve gotten away from it and forgotten. All of a sudden, we’re buying crap we don’t need and sacrificing dinners to pay for them. It’s stupid, and I’m just as guilty of it as you are.
When you sit down to put together your budget, take care of those things first. Even if that means you can’t pay a credit card bill right now, you need these things. What good is a decent credit score when you’re eating ham sandwiches in the dark because they turned off your electricity? Life takes on a whole different perspective when the basics are covered. Those are the moments when you think, “You know what? We’re going to be okay.”
And what about that bill that you can’t pay? Well, you may just have to tell them you can’t pay right now. Then you go out and you start working harder to bring in more money. But you have to take care of yourself first. Let the collectors stomp their feet and whine. You need to eat.
I have budgeted $30 a week for groceries for myself. It’s a very liberating feeling to go into the grocery store and have an obligation to myself to spend that $30 every week on food to keep my cupboards full. Having that psychological peace keeps your head on straight when you have to deal with the rest of the garbage of your financial situation. That’s a big key in getting out of it!
So remember: before you pay for anything, put dinner on the table, keep you and your family protected and warm, stay covered up, and get yourself to work and back. Build on that, and you’ve got yourself a solid plan. No amount of debt in the world is worth sacrificing those things from your life.
This is my favorite line in the budget.
Last year, while I struggled financially and professionally, I really didn’t do anything socially. I rarely went out for a drink, I never bought any clothes or anything for myself unless I had to (for example: when my only pair of jeans finally sprouted a hole). As mentioned in the introduction to this series, I rarely took my fiancé out on dates. Sounds pretty miserable, doesn’t it?
I’m not going to tell you to ignore your financial troubles, but you do need to get your mind off of them for the sake of your sanity, right? You need to go see a movie or treat yourself to a new pair of shoes (if you’re into that sort of thing). You need money to blow on stuff. Some people call it “blow money” or “fun money”. We call it “play money”.
Play money is the “no questions asked” line in the budget. It’s the money that my fiancé and I don’t need to explain to each other. As long as we have room in the Play Money budget, we can do whatever we want with it. She can buy more clothes (like she needs them), and I can grab a beer with my Best Man. She can go out to eat with her old friends from high school, and I can buy Bob and Brian albums.
Plus, we can go get a nice dinner together, or spend an off-day at IKEA imagining our future home, or go see a movie. Play money is like a candy bar to a dieter. It’s not something you need in excess, because it will completely derail your diet. But a well-placed candy bar lets you reward yourself for all the hard work you are doing.
It doesn’t have to be a lot, either. My play money is $75 every month. That’s hardly anything that’s going to paint the town red on a regular basis. But I can buy blank DVDs, a good dinner, and a few beers with that money every month.
To be honest, for my fiancé, it forces her to limit her shopping. She bonds with people over going for pedicures and grabbing a bite to eat and buying a bunch of clothes. And that’s perfectly fine! But now she just has to make sure that day doesn’t turn into $250 out the window. For me, on the other end of the spectrum, it forces me to have a life. I’ve spent a lot of time sitting around by myself because I’ve been broke. Now I can make sure I get together with friends and enjoy my life a little bit.
Ever go out and swipe your card thinking, “I really shouldn’t be doing this…” That type of night really puts a damper on your mood. The Play Money line in your budget liberates you from that by making sure you know exactly how much you can spend. You may have to limit yourself to more low-key activities like buying a case of beer and hanging out with friends at home, but it sure beats sitting at home alone doing nothing or that feeling in your gut when you know you shouldn’t be paying that much while you’re out.
If you remember from yesterday’s introduction, I mentioned that my fiancé and I have a $1,000 emergency fund in cash in a savings account. If you are six figures in debt, why would you want $1,000 in the bank just to sit there when you could use that to pay down some debts?
When people tell you how to get more mileage out of your gas tank, one of the first things they tell you is to not make any really sudden movements: don’t speed up too quickly, and don’t brake so hard. Try to keep it steady. There’s a reason for that: speeding up and slowing down burns more gas than maintaining your speed. That’s because the good ol’ force of inertia keeps you going.
Force of inertia: an object in motion stays in motion unless acted on by another object or force.
That same law of physics dominates the world of personal finance. When you get momentum going, life is good and things start getting paid off. But then your license plate renewal notice comes in the mail. Or your refrigerator breaks down. Or you come down with strep throat and you need to get a prescription filled.
Sudden emergencies pop up all the time, and it only takes a little one to completely derail your entire spending plan. Then you need to burn all that energy trying to get back on track because you stopped paying down your debts to take care of that one new bill and eventually you lose all motivation to even bother. “What’s the point, every time we get ahead something else comes up! We’ll never make it!”
FALSE.
You’re not making it because you’re not preparing yourself. An emergency fund is a tool that you can rely on in these situations. Hey, you are using this budget to plan for your long-term future, right? So why don’t you use it to plan your short-term future, too?
Because we are following Dave Ramsey’s plan, we went with $1,000. But you can do whatever you want. Many people do $500. Figure out what would be a good lump sum of money you could keep in an account just for quick emergencies while you work through your debts. This number can be different for everybody. If you’re out of debt and living large, a good rule of thumb from pretty much anybody in the financial world is to have 3-6 months’ worth of income in your emergency fund – at that point, it is there to prepare you for sudden unemployment.
This is a very common critique of the idea, and it’s one that my fiancé and I got from loved ones early on. That’s like carrying Band-Aids in your purse and somebody saying, “Well, that’s not going to help you when your leg gets chopped off!” Right, but we’re preparing for the more common papercuts here.
My attitude towards this statement is, “Hey, if an emergency pops up that costs more than $1,000, chances are I’ve got bigger things to worry about than just money!”
Most maintenance-type car repairs can be done for under $1,000. Minor medical bills can be paid for with $1,000. You can get a killer new refrigerator for a few hundred bucks. These are the financial “papercuts” that we’re preparing for here. You can take these problems in total stride, knowing you don’t have to change a thing – keep paying your debts, because you have the money to cover it. That’s what it’s there for.
Gifts (and I was guilty of dipping into it for that – I promised I wouldn’t do that again), groceries, gas, rent, credit card bills, etc. This is for EMERGENCIES. When you go to the store to buy Band-Aids, you don’t plop down your health insurance card to pay for it, do you? And if you do, please tell me where this wonderful coverage is!
Back to the car analogy: most of us are living financial lives riding the tails of the car in front of us. Once that car brakes, we either need to stop hard and waste a ton of gas or crash head-on into it. Having a small emergency fund increases your following distance – now you have room to brake a little slower and you can keep your momentum going (and you can avoid that crash!)
