Tired of having an over-stuffed wallet and paying too many credit card bills each month? Personal finance blog The Simple Dollar has a few suggestions on which cards to keep and which to start canceling over time. It's not as simple as cutting all of them up except one, as the post points out:Which is your oldest card? That card is the one that has the longest credit history, which is important for your credit report. For me, my oldest card is one that I got as a freshman in college. It has an atrocious "bonus" program associated to it (1/4% return in the form of "points"), but it was the first one I had and thus it's been on my credit report for more than a decade, establishing that I've had positive credit for a long while.Rather than keep the card in his wallet, however, the author simply locks it away in a safe, so the good credit hits keep coming every month. How did you decide which credit card gets the prime slot in your wallet? Share your wisdom in the comments. Photo by Get your expenses in order before the holidays with free ebook Within Your Means: Financial Planning for Hidden Expenses. Writer Michael Ham rolled an ebook and an Excel workbook together into one hybrid financial management tool. In addition to learning about implicit and explicit costs, you interact directly with the workbook by entering your income, expenses, and goals. A series of interrelated Excel formulas slowly molds a snapshot of your current financial situation. An Excel workbook to help you create a budget that recognizes not only your explicit expenses (rent/mortgage, utilities, groceries, auto insurance and registration, and the like), but also implicit expenses: the money you implicitly spend by gradually wearing out things you must replace (car, tires, mattress, TV, furniture, and the like).I spent an hour going through the workbook earlier this week and was pleased at how well the workbook complemented traditional financial software like Quicken, Money, Wesabe, and Mint.
Financial blog The Simple Dollar suggests using a visual reminder of your savings goals in order to keep up your motivation. Example: a simple graph with blocks that represent small fragments of your savings goal—each block equals money that you're actually putting in the kitty. Each time you are able to complete one of those small savings goals, you color in a new square; once you see those squares slowly filling up, you'll (hopefully) be more motivated to put even more in there. Do you visualize your savings goals? Share how and why in the comments.
Living frugally can be its own reward, but it's also fun to promise yourself incentives for implementing money saving practices into your life. Life improvement site Dumb Little Man reminds us that frugal does not have to equal miserable, and suggests that rewarding ourselves with little treats within the budget (of course) can have a direct effect on our continued efforts to live below our means.
Keep a running track of your bills by using index cards. Office productivity blog Web Worker Daily has more: Create a card for each bill, writing the name of the bill at the top. When you pay the bill, create an entry on the card. This way, you have a running log of all the bills you pay.Very low tech, but effective. You can also use these nifty The standard advice for the size of an emergency fund is enough money for three to six months of expenses; however, that's not necessarily an obtainable goal for many of us. Financial advice blog Wise Bread suggests that you aim for at least one month's worth of emergency money to cover your bare-bones expenses, and have it stashed where you can get to it quickly in case of an emergency. One month is the minimum—it's a good start on the road to the preferable three to six month fund. What tips do you have for those looking to build up an emergency money stash? Thoughts in the comments.

Track your spending via SMS, email, IM, or voice (via Jott) with web application Xpenser. After you sign up, you'll need to set up your account with your IM and SMS information and set up Jott to use with Xpenser (if you want to do voice tracking). After you're all set up, adding expenses to a report (you can create any number of reports and set a default for new additions) is as simple as, for example, texting something like "exp lunch 35.4 with Jack, Jill" to Xpenser. If you've ever had trouble keeping up with your expenses for the month, especially if you need to track your business expenses, Xpenser aims to be a simple, universally accessible solution for getting your expenses recorded as soon as they happen (it's like a super-charged