After reading a killer article about four-season gardening in Northern California, I discovered that one of the responses was written in a language other than English which looked interesting enough to try to translate. Somehow, while keying it in over at BabelFish, I happened to notice a link to Dr. Mercola's informative site called Take Control of Your Health. See how one thing leads to another?
Ever since he first started pointing out the dangers of artificial sweeteners, he has been one of my favorite resources, and so I clicked on the link to see what he was up to.
He was talking about some of the things schools should teach but never do. That led me to a fascinating link which Mercola describes as required reading, and so do I:
A Great Article by Brian Armstrong
There you will find two Excel templates that you can download for free that help streamline your monthly personal accounting. All I can say is WOW! Do it! Do it now!
When I was working on my PhT degree (Putting Hubby Through--that is the one I got before the PhD, to enable him to put me through!), I worked in a bank for several years.
There it was a customer who taught me something I consider a highly valuable life skill. When possible, code payments (and receipts) by incorporating the date into the payment amount. For example, I recently made a principal-only mortgage prepayment in the amount of 3009.27 instead of $3000 even. See the code? The payment tells me I made it on 9-27. Remembering that I'd made a prepayment in September, when I scanned my statement it showed a payment of $2845.16 instead. Without this trick I might have thought "That doesn't look right" but then set the statement aside for a few days to look up later, but this way I caught it right away and got it corrected immediately.
If you have more than one tenant you can code the apartment numbers into the amount of rent they pay, so that the tenant in apartment 5 pays 800.05 each month for example, and the tenant in apartment 6 pays $800.06 and so on. Then when you scan the bank statement it is easy to see which tenants are paid on time and which are late. It also helps identify who wrote checks that bounced, although we hope that never happens to you.
This is the sort of thing they should teach in school.
Oh, and if you are not familiar with Mercola, here is a good place to start:
Mercola's Natural Health Center
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