I’ve spent a good bit of time digitizing paperwork over the past couple of years. My primary weapon in this battle has been a sheet-fed scanner, though I sometimes snap pics with my iPhone and turn them into “scanned” pdfs using JotNot.

Depending on the specific model, your car loses 1-2% fuel efficiency for every 100 pounds of extra weight in the car. That’s a surprising amount that can really add up.

For example, let’s say you’re matching the extra weight that a friend of mine (who we’ll call Cathy) carries in her car. She consistently carries (mostly) unused car seats in the back seat of your car, plus she hauls around a box of books in the trunk along with a few other excess items. The sum total of that extra load is about 70 pounds.

Each week, I highlight ten things each week that inspired me to greater financial, personal, and professional success. Hopefully, they will inspire you as well.

1. Mortimer Adler on drudgework
I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad idea to work simply for the money sometimes.

“Work that is pure toil, done solely for the sake of the money it earns, is also sheer drudgery because it is stultifying rather than self improving.” – Mortimer Adler

When a mutual fund or hedge fund lists their historical returns, the industry standard is to use time-weighted returns that assume you buy at the beginning of the time period and hold until the end. However, what often happens is that a fund will start out small and have great returns for a while, gradually start attracting lots of investor money, and then the subsequent returns are not so hot. Whatever special inefficiency or investment idea the fund managers had initially is either wiped out by market forces over time or simply hindered by asset bloat.

If you’ve booked a vacation for your family lately, or sent your kid off on a school-sponsored field trip, you’ve probably considered trip-cancellation insurance. These offers generally promise to reimburse you for the vacation or field trip if you need to cancel. Are these plans worth the cost? It depends on your own personal risk calculation.

I don’t like high pressure sales situations.

Whenever I find myself in a situation where some cheesy salesperson is trying to give me the hard sell on some product, I find myself walking away. Even more so, I usually find myself getting a negative gut impression of the product being sold, one that’s usually reinforced when I go home and do the research only to find that the product is overpriced or underwhelming.

When my wife and I first got our Prius, we had a very difficult time getting the car to turn on.

Now, this seems like a completely simple issue. Put in the key, right?

Well, our Prius has a button on the dash that says “Power” instead of a key. Unfortunately, if you push that button without having a little keychain in your pocket, it won’t work.

Even stranger, if you push it with that keychain in your pocket and haven’t pressed down on the brake, you’ll just get the auxiliary power.

Eating out is fun, relaxing, tasty…and darn expensive! The current tough economic times have forced a lot of people to trim their dining budgets, but it’s a hard thing to give up altogether. So in the spirit of indulgence — but within a budget — here are eight tips for saving money at the restaurant:

Check this out… According to TransUnion, which is one of the big three credit bureaus, credit card delinquencies are currently at their lowest level in 17 years.

Surprised? I am. Given all the tight job market, stagnant wages, and increasing food prices (among other thing), I wouldn’t have expected it.

The following is an excerpt from Your MBA Game Plan, Third Edition: Proven Strategies for Getting Into the Top Business Schools, © 2012 Omari Bouknight and Scott Shrum. It is reprinted with permission of the publisher, Career Press, Pompton Plains, NJ.  800-227-3371.  All rights reserved.

A Conversation With Chad Troutwine