My car is old, dinged up, scratched and has a bumper that’s almost falling off. And I may drive it for another 8 years. Or I may buy a new car tomorrow. Either way, I’m pretty happy.
Two years ago my transmission died and really left me in a lurch. I had to make a call to fix the transmission on an old car and risk having something else break in the near future or give up on it and buy a new car. The problem was that I was not in a great financial position to buy a new car. That ended up being the motivating decision in fixing the transmission, fortunately it worked out for me, but I decided I didn’t want to be in that position the next time something went wrong.
I figured out how much it would have cost me to lease a car, which is the position I would have been forced into if my car had died, and it would have been (at the very least) about 10% of my take-home pay. Starting with my next paycheck, I took that 10% and put it into a car account. Over the next two years, it has grown to the point that I could not buy outright a decent used car. I also use that for maintenance costs on my current car.
This is something I recommend. It offers a lot of piece of mind and is relatively painless. When small maintenance issues do come up, I don’t worry because it feels like I’ve already paid for them. And when my car does finally die, I will have the funds ready to get a new one.
A few simple rules of organization:
As a web developer, I spend a lot of time close to my browser, both testing and research (and surfing for fun). Firefox is my browser of choice and I’ve learned a few tricks over the years that let me work quickly and effectively. 
My favorite place to vacation is Washing DC. It’s a great trip and if you do it right, it can be very cheap. I’ve been there three times in the last six years and here is the wisdom I have gained from those experiences. This article is modeled after the trip I took with a friend the summer after we graduated from high school. We spend four days in DC plus two on the road for a grand total of $500 (in 2003) each. That’s everything, food, gas, hotel and tolls. Any cost cutting measures I suggest here can be substituted with cash. 
I’ve talked about this before, but I wanted to revisit this concept because it’s really helped me out a lot. In Getting Things Done, one of the ideas people really latch onto is the tickler file. A great concept. If you are unfamiliar, the tickler file represents actions to be done on or after a specific date in the future, but are not appointments. They have a date aspect, but not a time specific aspect. Like buying a gift for your wife’s birthday, or preparing your taxes. There is not a specific time and date to do this, but it needs to get done with in a certain two week range (give or take). I’ve forgone the classic set of 43 folders (which I consider bulky) and gone with a Google Calendar solution.
There’s a technique I learned a couple years back that I rely on regularly now, it’s a trick to counting on your fingers that will let you count to nine on one hand and 99 with both hands. The concept is simple, the fingers on your right hand are worth one, the thumb is five, the fingers on your left hand are ten and the thumb is fifty. To make this work, instead of making a fist and sticking fingers out, touch a surface, like a table or your leg. Fingers touching the surface count, fingers not touching don’t. So touch your forefinger on your right hand to the table, that’s one. Add your middle finger, that’s two (two fingers touching the table). Now add your other two fingers, that’s four. Now lift your fingers and touch your thumb, that’s five. Add your forefinger, six. Add the middle finger seven. Ring finger, eight. Now add your pinky, and you have all the finger and the thumb on your right hand touching the table (or your leg) and that’s nine. Lift them all up, and touch the forefinger on your left hand to the table, that’s ten. It’s just keeps going, every time you run out of fingers on your right hand, add a finger on the left. You can count quickly from 1 to 99.
Over the last few months, I’ve been trying to get organized. One of the areas of my life that I’ve really spear-headed and made a lot of progress on is personal data and communications using the tools provided by Google. I took the time to get all my Google accounts stuff set up. Last October I had a few hundred messages sitting in my inbox. Now, most of the ones that I needed to read, I had read, but I hadn’t done anything with them. So I went through and cleaned everything out, but as I did this, I created filters and labels, which is just the way Gmail does things. Since October, I have kept my inbox under 10 items at all times.