Rockefeller said 10 percent. But if you can swing more than 10 percent, there's nothing wrong with that. The worst that can happen is that you can retire earlier than you planned.

Agreed on all counts. I also keep a spreadsheet where I project my spending. I give myself a small budget every month that I can spend however I want, but I have a pretty good idea where all of it's going to go through next May. Earlier this year I built a computer $100 at a time. Motherboard one month, memory and CPU…

Sounds like you're on the right track and don't need much help. But some things you could do would be to buy used whenever you can rather than new, making some energy improvements to cut utility bills (film on the windows in the winter, thermal curtains, change your AC/furnace air filter regularly, foam pads in your…

The stories of USPS losing packages are greatly exaggerated. For several years, my wife and I sent out hundreds of packages per month, mostly Media Mail. In a bad month, we'd have two packages disappear. Realistically, it's less than 1% of packages. Using delivery confirmation helps your odds, and buying insurance…

Keep in mind 28% is the max. I've heard as much as 30%. I just got through trying to rent out a house, and it's amazing how many people go beyond that 30%. Way, way too far beyond, in some cases.

I did, when I aligned my old OCZ Vertex drive. (I've been using SSDs for a while now.) It wasn't as big of a difference as you notice between a heavily fragmented HDD and a freshly defragmented HDD, but it's also something you only have to do once.

There's a 96 GB Kingston drive available at Amazon and other places right now for around $140. It has a Toshiba controller in it. Not the fastest drive on the market, but that's the lowest price per GB on a low-end drive I've seen.

Usually there are a few things you can do to speed up boot time. Hard-code your hard drive settings rather than letting them be set to autodetect. When motherboards have 14 SATA ports on them these days, it takes some time to try to autodetect all those drives. Set the memory test settings to minimal. Some boards even…

Agreed. For a couple hundred bucks you can build a desktop PC that will be a lot smaller, quieter, and friendlier on your electric bill. I just got a motherboard, 8 GB of RAM, and a dual-core AMD CPU for under $200 that I dropped into a discarded Compaq Presario case.

Buy stock while it's cheap. Seriously. The market will go back up again. The stock I bought in 2008 was worth a good 30-40% more come early 2011. When you're young, the market going down is actually good news.

The key is using your credit cards without falling into the trap of spending more money. So I'll use my credit card to do things like buy gas, but pay cash at restaurants or the grocery store to stay within my budget for the month. I also have the option to pay a couple of my recurring monthly bills with a credit…

Do both. Enable the strongest encryption you can, protect it with the strongest key you can stand to type, and name it something scary sounding or uninteresting. DO NOT name it something personally identifiable like your name or address, and don't name it something that suggests it might be protecting something…

Paper is generally pretty willing to absorb odor, and not so willing to give it up. You can see this effect with old books. Once an old book starts to smell rank, due to being stored in a musty basement or around people who smoke heavily, it's almost impossible to get it to smell new again.

One thing you might want to do before you make any changes in the BIOS is to load the BIOS defaults. Then go make any necessary changes. The first time I loaded Windows 7, my onboard video failed with a code 43 error, and I spent a couple of days trying to find a solution before I thought to load the BIOS defaults.…

It does depend on where you live, and/or the season. In Missouri in August, there's not a lot of problem with static discharge. But in the winter there certainly is.

I am extremely biased towards Kingston and Crucial memory. I've handled literally thousands of modules from those two companies and I have seen *maybe* five bad ones. My success rate with other brands is lower.

Whenever I hear beep codes, I automatically reseat the video card and the memory to see if the problem goes away. If that doesn't fix it, then I remove the memory. If the beep code stays the same, then I probably have a memory issue, so I try the memory one module at a time.

Here are a few tricks for keeping yourself grounded while doing the system build:

It depends on the quality of the case. The more expensive the case, the thicker the metal, and the less your chances of bleeding are. I try to examine cases in person before buying, just to be sure. I've had my share of cuts over the years, but costlier cases will save you considerable pain. Like others have said, you…

The other downside to cheap cases is the chance for injury. The light gauge metal in them is easy to cut yourself on. You don't have to spring for a Lian-Li case or something, but it's worth stepping up from a $20 case to a $50 case at the very least.