Personal Money Tips

I paid of my car loan last week, and what a great feeling it was. No more writing cheques to the bank every month. Cars are expensive where I live. It is due to the way the tax structure is set up here. Since I had to get a release letter from the same branch I got the loan from, I went back there and it brought back memories. Flashback of sorts.

I thought back to the time I went to apply for a loan what I learned from this car loan. Some 4 years ago, I remembered signing the loan documents. It took more than 2 weeks to get the loan approved and other documents of ownership to be transferred. Eagerly I waited till the day I got the keys. Although it was only a used car, it was almost new. Only 18 months old at that time.

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Over the past few weeks, I’ve mentioned several ideas to generate side income. There is also a link to a post from BusinessCreditCars with listed 77 side income ideas.

Today, I want to highlight an often missed area to increasing your income, which is through increased productivity. Increasing your productivity will definitely increase your income over the long run. Think about it.

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If you have read my post in the past about the true cost of ownership, you’ll know that I’m a firm believer of making my stuff last as long as possible. However, with one caveat. For as long as you can still get the job done on them. If it take forever to make your PC boot, then, the time cost for you is much more than saving a few bucks for it.

But, what happened in the last 2 weeks was, I got wind of a sub notebook for under $400. Being curious, I went for a look. If you don’t know it yet, it is the Asus Eee PC which is a popular gadget today. Basically, it is a relatively cheap laptop that runs all your basic applications and it is based on a Linux OS. Small and cheap enough to do typing, emailing and cheaper than some PDA’s. Well, I did not buy this gadget, (I would have if I did not buy my PDA last year) but it led me to Linux OS, specifically Puppylinux.

What is so special about Puppylinux? It is a very small operating system and will run on an old Pentium with just 128MB of RAM. I’m not sure if you can still find a running PC that old. But I’m pretty sure you have some old PII or PIII around. Now, with computer prices dropping all the time, where is this post heading?

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