While at the counter waiting for her to ring me out, the lady and I were talking and somehow we got to what phone my wife had. As soon as I told her which phone, she asked is she was having problems with it. I told her that she had been having a few problems with the touch screen and she said that it was a rather common problem. She offered up that if my wife were to come in and explain that to the service department, they would offer her either new firmware, or a replacement to a newer version of the phone. I asked her when the cutoff time would be for them to offer her a new phone and she told me that if she didn’t report the problem by the time the 1 year warrantee ran out, then we’d be out of luck. That deadline is the middle of September.

I thought that was great. My wife had been dealing with the phone for almost a year, having difficulty pushing buttons on a particular section of the screen. She wasn’t making a big deal about it, but I tried to use it a few times and got really frustrated.

She was at the mall at the time and when she wandered back in, I told her to bring the phone to the service counter and ask for the upgraded software. I figured that that might be enough, and if it wasn’t, we could always go back in and trade it in for the newer model in a month or so.

As of right now, she has decided to go back in and get the replacement phone. There was a giant difference between the old and new software, but it still has issues.

I figured that she might as well get as much time out of her old phone as she could before trading it in for the new one. So if anyone has the Samsung Glide, go to Verizon and get a replacement or if it has been a year, at least get the software upgrade. It adds some cool features that I feel you are missing out on.

I’ll post again if she is unable to get the new phone for free, and the article will not be as upbeat.

If this article prompts you to spend one of the most beneficial hours you’ve ever had, then no. There are only four things that you will do in this hour. Give it a try.

1) Organize your important papers. Things like deeds, mortgages, leases, life insurance details, warrantees and other things. Put them all in one place and anything new that comes in should be put there directly.

2) Start a tax folder.  You need your W2, and you won’t get that until January or February, but there are things that should go together to help you get organized for when you do your taxes. Things like the tax preparer’s bill from last year, educational expenses, and receipts from the home depot. With all of these things together in one folder or box, it’ll be much easier to find a spot to put these types of things when you get them. Here is a more complete list if you need one.

3) Start using bill pay at your bank. For more on this check here.

4) Set up a budget. For more on this check here.

OK, so it might have taken you an hour and ten minutes, but I promise that you will be much more prepared for the future. If you haven’t started this list yet, do it. Don’t hesitate.

Most of the accounts that you have don’t really matter, but there are probably some that you wouldn’t want to slip away.
You had better have an online savings account by now, and if the statements only go to your email address, they might be lost. This is especially scary if you should become incapacitated. You would likely need this money to help pay for good medical care.
You might have an online digital photo stash, which had less monetary value than sentimental, but it should not be lost just because the account is forgotten.
There is a service called Legacy Locker that promises to keep all of your online accounts together in one area. It allows you to pass on access to each account to anyone you choose.
They also allow you to write personal “Legacy Letters” to anyone you want that would be distributed automatically. I’m not sure that this service makes up for a lack of a will, although I’m sure that you could write a will up as one of your letters.
If you don’t take advantage of this service, you should at least give some thought to the things that would need to be found. I keep a password list saved somewhere where my wife could find it. None of the passwords are actually on it, but there are clues for her to get to the password, just in case it goes public.
I have accounts all over the place; pictures over here, bank accounts over there, money with poker sites and PayPal. For most of these accounts, I have online statements. There is not too much money floating around other than the savings accounts, but it would be a shame to lose it all. I have most of my online pictures on my hard drive. I put them on the internet for backup purposes mainly.
I’m not going to bother creating another account by using this service, but I will update my password list so that nothing important is missing.

We began looking online at the various sites that seemed to have low prices. We were trying to get the gist of what our budget would get us. We were looking to stay around $1000 but we would go higher if it made a difference. I had my eye on a few that seemed to be good deals. After printing a few of the prices out we decided that we had to see the performance in action. We drove to the local Sears and started staring into the screens, trying to clue into the difference between the styles. Plasma, LCD, 1080P, there were some really nice TVs. The problem was that I was holding a piece of paper that had a few of the same TVs at Sears, but for prices around half of what they were charging. It was a good learning experience.

Later that week we stopped by Wal-Mart to see what they had and the picture quality of even their top model was terrible. You could see images dragging all over the place. Nothing was crisp; all of the lines were blurred. These models were right in the $1000 – $1200 range which was where we wanted to be, but I couldn’t get myself to buy any of them. I would have been embarrassed to have them in my house.

We went to a high-end electronics boutique, and they had some really nice TVs, but again, their prices were way too high and the worst part was they were showing a Blu-Ray of fish swimming slowly around. The picture quality was amazing, but because we watch a lot of sports, I wanted to see the picture moving faster in a more realistic setting for my needs.

We wound up going with a TV from Amazon.com. It was the same TV that we had seen at Sears for $2800, but we paid under $1400 including “white glove” delivery. The TV was delivered 3 days later while my wife was home alone. She called me as soon as they arrived and when I got there 9 minutes later the delivery guys were gone, the TV was out of the box, and sitting on the living room floor waiting for me to setup.

She and I moved the old tube TV off of the stand and replaced it with the new Samsung 46″ 1080P LCD with 120 Hz. What a difference. I had called the cable company and had them turn on the high def service the day before, so I plugged in a few wires, I also bought the HDMI cables from Amazon for under $10.

What a picture! Everything looks so realistic. It really is an unbelievable difference. I know that there are a lot of bloggers saying that cable is a waste of money, but I’m sure they have never seen a baseball game in high def. Hockey is unbelievable and basketball is just ridiculous. You can see what type of beer that rowdy fan in the 15th row is drinking even when they are out of focus.

Since I bought the TV, the price had gone up by $200 or so for the same model, but if you are looking, I have included a link to the one we chose. I can’t give it enough praise.

Microsoft has a product that it calls skydrive that gives you 25 Gigabytes, which is probably about as much as you will need to back up most of you documents unless you have digital video or tens of thousands of pictures. You could back up the very essential ones. I’d recommend getting an external hard drive. You can get a terabyte or 1000 gigabytes for $120. This is more space than you know what to do with, but it sure is nice to know that you will not run out of space and have to select things to delete.

There are programs that you can use that will back up your entire computer, but for most people, the occasional backup of a few folders is enough.

For me, I backup my whole document folder, which has my school documents, all of my website stuff, my giant digital photo folder and all of my music. I keep all of the programs that I use on disc and would be able to download any of the other programs again if I needed to.

 Monthly, I drag and drop my document folder and replace the old one. It takes some time, but it is nice to know that I will not lose everything if my laptop should die, or if I should accidentally spill a margarita on it, God forbid. You laugh, but a roommate of mine had that happen to hers and it wasn’t funny to her. We all thought it was hilarious.

I also backup my toolbar folder. If you don’t know what this is, and you have a machine running windows, create one; it is well worth it. Create a new folder on your desktop, name it something small, like “T” and drag it to the top right-hand corner. Put a few documents that you access often into it or put some shortcuts to those documents. Once you have some files in it, right click the taskbar and select toolbars, go down to new toolbar and choose this folder. Now you should have a nice little quick launch area. Keep this up to date with documents, folder and shortcuts to documents that you use often and it will surely save you time. It’s pretty cool, right?

It is great to have multiple accounts. There is some time spent maintaining the balances of each, but that is far outweighed by the organization that it allows. Each of these separate buckets creates a bit of formality to deal with when we want to make purchases and this makes it a conscious decision.

With online savings accounts, they are easily set up once you have one, and you can open or close them as you please on the fly. I feel that the more you have, the better, and because of all of the compartmentalization, I find myself really surprised when I take a look at the total of all of the accounts. It’s nice to know that if something were to really go wrong, I could dip into other sections if it was necessary.

If you don’t want to take it to this extreme, you should really have at least two accounts. Start out with a rainy day fund and then once this is at capacity, move some into a account to be used to save up for something. Whether it is a vacation, or a house, it is a good way to keep things apart on paper and in your mind.

Another deterrent that I use is to come up with a determined time value of my money. If it takes me an hour of work to take home $20, then it would cost me 10 hours to afford something that costs $200. Once I have that value, I would weigh it against the cost of the item in question. Would it be worth a quarter of a work week to have it?

When I was in college, I never said “I can’t afford it” and it took me 5 years to dig myself free of that. I ran up some serious debt. If people were going out to grab some dinner and drinks, or going to the movies, I would always go. I had the latest technology and made a lot of bad decisions. I had a lot of fun and wouldn’t trade it for anything, if only for the lessons that were learned. It sure took a lot of hard work to undo though and it was an expensive lesson.

I was on my way as soon as I realized that I couldn’t afford it all.