Your comment in the “next goal” section about paying down your debt by starting with the largest balance doesn’t completely make sense to me. I agree you should focus on a single priority item, but I think you’re better off paying down the item with the highest interest rate first. There may be some exceptions to this rule, for example your mortgage may have a higher interest rate than your car loan, but you may choose to pay off the car loan first because of the tax deduction you get from mortgage interest.

My online backup choice is Mozy.com. $55/year gets you unlimited backup of one PC. If my PC were to ever crash, I would just log-in to Mozy.com on my new machine to downloaded every file on the spot.

I still find a lot of value keeping a hard copy. I tend to forget what\’s on my hard drive and it\’s a little easier to consistently review something that\’s printed out and kept in one physical location. Of course, for things that don\’t need to be regularly reviewed, digital is the way to go.

If you have a digital system that works for you, I\’m all for it.

P.S. For readers that don\’t know how to create pdfs, I recommend a free program called PDF Creator. To create a PDF file, you actually print the file and choose the PDF option in the printer drop-down menu. It will then ask you where to save the file. It\’s essentially printing to PDF.

Saving a read-only (and date stamped) version of a budget or other financial worksheet will do… tho I prefer printing to a PDF.

Btwn online banking/billing and my own data saved as PDFs, I’m clearing a few file drawers. Powerful desktop search tools make this more compelling than ever, esp. if you dread paper filing as much as I.

Very interesting read… I also find great merit in the GTD techniques/mindset.

You’re right though, mvelopes does operate on this very principle which is why it’s so effective. Using this system “every dollar has a name.”

Eventually I think we’ll see the point technology-wise where you can transact digitally and have really-time feedback as to how much money you have and what categories the dollars are in. I would like to be able to input at check-out which category the purchase is coming out of and get feedback as to the funds remaining in that category. With technologies like smart cards and using mobile phones, we aren’t too far off. That way you could have the convenience of electronic transactions while maintaining the advantage of real-time feedback that cash provides.

One more technology that is intriguing is the ability to have a display on a credit card. You could do what I’ve described above, all on your credit or debit card.