Less Paper, More iPad

I think I've written before that I feel as if I have not tamed the paper dragon of financial, business, miscellaneous papers. Yesterday Marilyn was here and we tackled a table which is a dumping ground. Now that I have finally filed my 2013 income taxes, I could file away a whole lot of paper.

I can be ruthless in throwing, but I became more so. For example, I started shredding the monthly brokerage paper statements. I only really check my SEP and Roth on line so why keep those endless reports? Later that day, I happened to talk to my broker and told him that -- and he said that he could provide me with any month's statement I wanted.

We ended up with two recycling bags of paper and one garbage bag of other papers.

Here's a good example: I have people's addresses in an excel spread sheet, but when my former computer died, I lost the spreadsheet and started building a new one. I still had people's addresses from Christmas cards to enter -- and of course that was never a priority so I'd pick up the same damn envelope with someone's address on it 100 times. Now all of that is gone and entered.

Marilyn also gave me my first iPad lesson and now I can see what all the shouting is about. Now I can get mail, Google and do YouTube on my iPad and when she comes back next week we'll go on to another lesson, but it's been fun learning.

Cool today in the low 70s -- it's really more like late September than mid-July.