Filed under: Finance, World wide web, News, Productivity

Rudder is a personal finance management site that pushes your banking info and upcoming due bills to your email inbox. This may free you from your compulsion to log in to your on the web bank site. Generally, there are all kinds of tools available from banks nowadays which push account updates to you via text, email, voice mail, etc.

The nice thing about Rudder is you can add multiple accounts like your credit cards, checking/savings accounts from other banks and roll them into your Rudder account so everything is all in one place. Each morning, you get an account update of all your finances in your email.

Rudder also reminds you when your bills are due and tells you to pay them. If you heed the reminders, you might be able to stave off those $39 late fees on your credit card bills.

Each daily activity report provides you with reminders of which bills are due, an activity feed of account transactions, account balances, and then tells you what’s left. The What’s Left feature looks into the future and does the math based on your upcoming bills, future paydays and calculates the statement balance for your credit cards. You then get a nice picture of your what you can spend or save after your bills are factored in.

Rudder isn’t Quicken or Mint.com. It doesn’t have cool categorization features or fancy pie charts and it doesn’t compare your spending with others in different cities. It does, however, provide a nice way to keep tabs on your personal finances all in a nice email delivered daily to your inbox.

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Filed under: Windows, Macintosh, Linux, E-mail, Productivity, Google, Freeware, How-Tos

A friend recently asked me how he could set his Gmail up so that he could email himself ideas, and have them be automatically filed away into a specific label instead of clogging up his inbox. Gmail has a function called Filters which is similar to rules in other email systems, and it is very powerful and well-suited to this task. If you would like to be able to email yourself information and have it automatically be stored away into a label and stay out of your inbox, follow these instructions.

So the first thing to keep in mind is that there are reasons where you might legitimately want to email yourself and have it show up in your inbox, for example you might Reply All to something and find that your email address was included as an addressee. You don’t want a thread like that one getting automatically moved into a folder, or you might miss it.

So the solution is to use a custom email address, which is simple. Gmail supports an email standard that grants you to add a plus symbol after your username, and anything you like after that. So an email sent to username+ideas@gmail.com will go right into your Gmail account the same way one sent to username@gmail.com will.

But here’s the cool thing: you can filter based on the actual incoming email address. Here’s how:

Continue reading How to organize your ideas in Gmail - Emailers Anonymous

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Filed under: Marketing and advertising, McDonald’s (MCD), Yum Brands (YUM), Wendy’s Intl (WEN), Burger King Hldgs (BKC)

Yum! Brands (NYSE: YUM) wants to educate its patrons. No, it’s not going to be offering history lessons to go along with its personal pizzas, fried chicken and burritos. It just wants to make sure you know exactly how many calories are in the stuff you eat at its restaurants. The information will be posted at company-owned locations over the next few years. Management is hoping that franchise locations will also participate in the initiative (I’m sure most eventually will).

Personally, I think this is a great idea. How could anybody be opposed? After all, if I’m in a Pizza Hut, I want to know how much damage I’m doing to myself. Yes, I am one of those people who actually checks out the nutrition pages on the sites of fast-food joints such as McDonald’s (NYSE: MCD), Burger King (NYSE: BKC) and Wendy’s Arby’s Group (NYSE: WEN).

But yes, there’s a downside for shareholders when this type of information is made available. Indeed, the more I’ve learned about the health effects of a bad diet, the more conservative I’ve been about going to a KFC or a McDonald’s. No doubt Yum! will see some challenges from people scaling back on buying the junk food it sells. Will there be a significant effect? Will Yum! and its various chains disappear as a result of this decision? No. Management will simply adjust, if it becomes necessary, and will try to offer healthier selections.

Continue reading Should Yum! Brands reveal calorie data?

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Filed under: World wide web, Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Productivity, Mozilla, Freeware, Browser Tips

Love him or hate him, productivity blogger Merlin Mann has come up with a great way to help keep yourself on track. The idea is to avoid the seductions of the internet by stopping a moment to make sure that you’re spending your time on what you really want to be spending it on.

In his blog post on the subject, Merlin describes opening folders full of bookmarks all in one go, which have the potential to suck up massive amounts of time. He therefore created a page on his site that asks him “Is this what you want to be doing right now?”, and included it as the first bookmark in each of his folders of bookmarks.

While this is a great idea, if you don’t operate the same way, opening complete folders of bookmarks all at once, this probably won’t help you much. But what if you could set your browser to open this page by default each time you opened a blank new tab or new browser window?

With the NewTabURL extension for Firefox, you can do exactly that. Slick, and helpful.

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