Labels for LifeLabels for Life will give tips for organizing your life, home and office.

Wouldn’t it be nice not to have piles of paper in heaps, in files, covering your desk, on your kitchen table? Weren’t we promised paperless offices years ago. Except for some very determined and organized people, few have been able to accomplish this.

Banks, credit card companies, online storage companies all encourage us to save trees, take advantage of the technology available, opt for ebills and actually establish paperless offices.

It is important to make a commitment to a paperless office. Then systematically one needs to opt for ebills. Some online paying systems make this very easy and painless. Once you’ve switched to ebills, it also helps to sign on for alerts by email. This can be customized so that you’re alerted as soon as your ebill is available, 5 or 9 days (say) before the due date or if the bill has not been paid online by the due date; and of course all of the above, if you choose. There is then the task of creating electronic folders on your computer for all your payees. The ebills can then go into the respective folders, all organized for the taxman. Many businesses that provide ebills have not yet furnished a means by which individuals can mark their ebills as paid. Ebills may be available in PDF form but anything you might want to add to it cannot then be saved unless you have the appropriate Adobe software yourself. You can usually take a snapshot of whatever you have filled in and paste it and save it in Word.

It would be wonderful to eliminate all tax forms: income, business, employer…….all! But we’re not there yet. Fortunately it’s coming. Even the IRS promises to have everything in electronic form soon.

Once we’ve made the commitment to ourselves to do this it will need a concerted effort to make sure paper is not generated for anything. All invoices would have to be sent via email. If you have a business, eventually you would need to roll out an online service where clients can have accounts and be able to deal with payments etc. online. There might be stray bills that still come via snail mail. But they would be so few and far between, it would become very easy to immediately file away in the appropriately custom label file in those very stylish file drawers that are now available.

Many automotive businesses can benefit from labels or decals. Also some business can market their business with automotive decals. There are so many options that you can choose from. They will increase your market or provide return customers. If you need a few ideas, keep reading and you’ll see just a few of the many things that can be done with automotive decals. After you have read these ideas you are sure to know what you want to represent your company or organization.

Vinyl Decals

Vinyl decals are a semi-permanent item that are very eye-catching and give a very professional look. These are frequently used by auto dealers to represent where the car was purchased. Many businesses can use this form of advertising. If you want to catch peoples’ eye this is a great way to do that. You can even have a logo made into the vinyl, which will help people remember you. Many people remember a logo better then a name, just a little tip.

Bumper Stickers

These are a popular and useful. Some of these are for personal beliefs or funny statements. They are also used by many non-profit organizations use them to get their name out for many to see and remember them. Businesses also use these to create repeat exposure. These can be fun and promotional all in one. You can consider getting bumper stickers printed in a variety of colors so that customers can chose a color that goes best with the color of their car, plus they will just enjoy having choices.

Oil Change

Auto shops can use oil change window stickers to remind their customers of when they need to return for their next oil change. It is a great idea to place your business name and contact information so they can call if they need to. This will remind them of your business if something else comes up where they can use your services.

Parking Permit

So many people use parking garages everyday now. By using a sort of sticker identification, you can reduce the amount of traffic backup a garage gets. These can be placed on the back of the rear view mirror or on the windshield. You can get parking permit stickers in a different color for every month so the attendant will easily know when the tag has expired and the customer needs to renew. Another good idea would be to place a number representing the year so there is no confusion as to when it was purchased. These can also be used for large apartment complexes that have a lot of tenants. They can indicate paid parking spots, or what area they are to park in.

Window Decals

These have a wide range of use. You can promote a business, a college, a sports team, or pretty much anything you want. These can be simple or more complex; what ever suits your purpose better. Window decals are also used to indicate that a car has a security system, the help prevent car theft.

Fall’s here.  It’s the ideal time to take a good look at your closet.  Is it bursting at the seams?  Could it do with a makeover?  Let’s take a page from the experts.

All essentially spring clothes can be stored away to make room for the heavier sweaters of fall.  This is a good time to inspect all your clothes.  Do you need to pare them down?

Anything that doesn’t fit right, needs severe repair, doesn’t do much for you or your figure could summarily be dismissed to the Discard pile.  Good clothes that will be used through fall can be assigned to the Keep pile.  Closet makeover experts, Jesse Garza and Joe Lupo of Visual Therapy recommend an Archive pile.  This could be your storage pile plus any outfits of merely sentimental value.  You may never wear them but can’t bring yourself to throw.  These may include things like baby clothes, your wedding dress, your grandma’s gorgeous skirts from the home country.  The Archive pile has no place in your closet.  It needs to be relegated with other stored stuff to a little used room, a cool dry place in your basement or attic.

Jesse’s philosophy is we must “learn how to let things go back out into the universe. It’s the circle of life.”  Once the piles are made come the hard decisions.  From the Discard pile is there something someone else can use, should they be donated to the needy or tossed in the nearest garbage bag.  The archival pile and how they should be stored will be discussed in a later blog.  Now we need to deal with the Keep pile.

Double rods double up space for your clothes.  If you’re not very handy with a power drill or don’t know someone who is, you can opt for inexpensive hanging rods that hook onto the existing rods in your closet.

Now for the shelves above your rods:  Hopefully you have one or two of those.  This is where you can store three handy tools to corral your favorite slips, lingerie, trinkets, handbags, wallets etc.

Clear shoe boxes are excellent for storing rolled up slips, camisoles etc.  This keeps them from taking up hanging space and slipping off the hangers as they are wont to.  Square wicker or rush baskets or trays provide great storage for handbags, clutches, your gloves, wallets etc.  Keep your dressers clear and store your trinkets and baubles in small boxes housed in a large box clearly labeled according to your preference.

Line them up on your shelves as shown and stack your favorite cashmeres in between.

Storage Boxes

Once your closet has had its makeover, it becomes very easy to keep it lean, mean and a functioning machine for you.  All the pretty corralling tools with matching hangers for your clothes will have transformed your closet.  You will want to be keep it uncluttered and ship-shape.  The closet in its new avatar will itself be the motivating factor that will make you keep it in order.

Do you shudder when tax-time comes? Do shoeboxes of bills and receipts confront you in April? Organize yourself for tax-time all year round.

Mom and Dad at Taxtime

All is not lost. There’s still time to get ready for April 2009 without getting flustered. You can do one better for 2009 records. At the very beginning of the year grab a file folder, duly label it Tax year 2009. In you pop those DMV bills that let you claim license fees on your 1040. If you have medical bills, prescription, flex or HSA claims, pop them in or better yet, have a separate sub-folder for them. An accordion file, subcategorized with appropriate labels, is another device for all your tax papers.

If you have a home office and who doesn’t these days, have a separate file for your mortgage bills. If you claim your home office on your personal income tax it’s a sound idea to have your mortgage bills readily available. Have you made charitable contributions? Those receipts should also be safely tucked away to claim your deductions. For small business home offices you might have other claims. Do you claim a percentage of your utility bills, landscaping and gardening and other such expenses? All this paperwork should also be ready at hand.

When February rolls around, the bank will send you your mortgage annual statements. 1099s will arrive daily in the mail. All your annual stock statements will be arriving. Immediately stock them away in your 1040 file. As soon as they are all there, you can easily start on your income tax return.

Once those returns are done, you can begin to relax. Maybe for once you can actually enjoy those April showers and flowers and Spring! There’s one more chore, however. If there are credit card statements and other expenses that you couldn’t take any deductions for, if you don’t need them for anything else, do shred and discard them. Returns from previous years and back-up paperwork for them can be archived and put away so they don’t clutter up your new filing system. If you follow these simple tips, when tax-time rolls around again, you will be less stressed. With no disorganization and chaos to deal with, come tax-time you will save time and tax-time will become less taxing!

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Before organizing the entire kitchen, lets zero in on a very important aspect of the cooking paraphernalia. Let’s focus today on herbs and spices. It is very handy to store spices atop the stove. Spices are readily available when cooking and its easy to add a pinch of oregano or a dash of cayenne. However, herbs and spices deteriorate very fast especially in the presence of heat, or light or steam. It makes more sense to store them in airtight containers or tucked away in a drawer or shelf out of the sunlight.

You might want to choose a drawer or shelf right next to the stove and add an organizer such as in the picture to store your herbs and spices. Prefilled spice bottles in designer racks may look great but the spices in them may be old and offer no punch to your cooking. The wise and organized chef or cooking novice may prefer to find empty spice bottles, fill them with fresh herbs and spices of their choice and cover them with gorgeous customized labels available these days. Or you might like labels which are meant to cover your jars to further protect them from light.

Imagine your spice drawers looking like Emeril’s! It would be incentive enough to create a rush that will see you through organizing countertop, shelves and your entire kitchen!

You might want to alphabetize them. Start from the top with “anise,” “allspice,” etc. and move slowly down the alphabet to the bottom or better yet, qwertize them so your hand will automatically go to the spice or herb of your choice just like it would on your keyboard!

Credit card companies, financial institutions and others are constantly pushing everyone to save some trees and request ebills. One reason why people are reluctant is probably their limited access to digital storage. But no more. These days all sorts of storage is available in the internet “cloud.”

Digital photographs, videos, all sorts of electronic files, your daily backups can all be stored in a safe, remote location right from your own desktop. There are many advantages to this not the least of which is being invariably forced to sort through all the digital data cluttering up your hard drive, categorize them in some way, choose and pick from them and in short, get organized!

Digital storage totally bypasses the need to buy and burn and make custom labels for CDs or DVDs and store them in boxes on shelves. However, if you do choose to use CDs or DVDs make sure to label and mark them as you go. With web storage, digital information is freed from one computer and /or location. It can be accessed from almost anywhere via any internet-connected device.

Earlier this month Microsoft launched its SkyDrive service that offers 5GB of free, safe storage accessed via one’s Live ID. SkyDrive offers personal, shared and public folders which facilitates safe file-sharing with friends and family and the public at large.

Free, unlimited storage is available from MediaFire. One doesn’t need to register for this site. The site is accessed via a cookie stored in the individual’s computer. However, it is recommended that one register for their free account. This way there is no chance of unwittingly deleting the cookie and losing all one’s stored files. MediaFire, at the moment, offers unlimited uploads but each file is limited to 100 MB. MediaFire also offers safe, personal file storage and the ability to safely share files with others.

Mozy

Xdrive offers 5GB of free storage for backups. However, for under $10 a month or an annual charge of $99.50, it is possible to get 50 GB for backup of one’s personal data. Carbonite offers only paid but unlimited storage for backups. Box.net offers 1 GB for free and 5GB for a charge of $7.95 a month. Mozy Online Backup Home offers 2GB for free and unlimited storage for $4.95 a month.

Is bill-paying getting your goat? Are those staggering heaps of incoming mail lying on your kitchen table, your dining table and coffee table making you see red? Here’s a surefire way to banish them forever.

Don’t grant them a resting place in your home…..even for a minute! As soon as you pick up the day’s mail, sort them into piles that have one of the three labels, “keep,” “toss” and “ID theft”. It’ll take 30 seconds. Discard your “toss” pile and the envelopes and inserts from the rest of the mail. The “ID theft” pile consists of those invitations from credit card companies etc. You need to shred those letters immediately before tossing them away. That leaves your “keep” pile, which are mostly bills.

Use a bill paying system for your bills. Most banks now offer free billpay or choose one that does. Financial programs such as Quicken also offer this convenience for a nominal charge. Stack your bills right next to your computer. You’ll need to spend an hour or so initially to enter them into your system. You’ll need to enter your bank account number and the account number of the businesses you need to pay, you enter right off of your bill. Once you’ve set this up, you can choose to make payments once a week or once every two weeks. Most businesses, like credit card companies let you adjust your bill due date so that you can arrange to pay most of your bills on one or two sittings at your computer.

You can even set up your payments to get paid 3 or 4 days before the bill due date. Now you’ve dispensed with envelopes, stamps, bills and all that clutter that lies around till you get your check book out and pay those bills. With a click of your mouse and five minutes of your time you’ve vanquished those staggering piles of bills!

While the holidays are a few weeks away, most companies are starting to think about what gift they’ll send to clients, vendors and others. You want to send something great that your clients and vendors will enjoy. But no matter what you send – now is the time to really “wow” your clients with a great holiday message.

Personalized labels are an excellent way to send out holiday greetings to everyone while giving a nice gift. The labels can be attached to the gift. By not sending out cards, the money you save on cards and stamps can be put in your budget towards a gift. The best personalized label is one that sends out a holiday greeting that matches your company’s personal style. Some companies are very corporate and others are more buttoned down. So a formal message may appeal to one company and a more approachable message may appeal to the other one.

One of the best things about choosing personalized labels is that you are almost guaranteed to have everyone see your greeting. Whereas with a card, just a few people in the office will see it – a personalized label is seen by everyone enjoying the gift. So if you send a food related gift then everyone enjoying the gift will see the personalized label reminding everyone to have a happy holiday season.

A favorite thing with personalized labels is that this is an easy way for everyone to know who a company holiday gift is from. Where a gift can get separated from a tag or card quite quickly, a label sticks to your food related or other type of gift. This way everyone will know the gift is from you. This lets them enjoy your sense of friendliness and goodwill towards them. And they also know this gift is from your company. Many times you deal with quite a few people at a company yet only send one company gift. By choosing personalized labels, you’ll know that everyone sees this label.

There are many holiday themed accents you can choose for your personalized label. Trying fonts in holiday colors like red, green, blue, gold and silver are all ideal choices. Adding accents like snowflakes, snowmen, Christmas, Hanukah or Happy New Year items are great.

Holiday Personalized Label Tips:

Take some time choosing the best greeting. Think first who your gift will be going to. What would be the best greeting to say to them? Try to come up with several to choose from.

Choose fonts that are easy to read like Arial, Courier and Times New Roman. Fancy script fonts look pretty but often are hard for many to read. If you are getting personalized labels, you want everyone to be able to read the greeting.

Always add your company logo and try to add a few holiday accents. Try to ask the art department to make a very small and simpler version of your company logo ideal for the label. Anything representing your business should have your company logo on it. Add some fun holiday accents like snowflakes or a snowman to celebrate the holidays if appropriate.

Best tip: your label should always represent your company well. Take the time to create the best greeting and select the other accents that represent your business. A food gift will likely be put in the employee break room for everyone to share and those feelings of goodwill for your company will be felt for a long time. You want your personalized label to look attractive and represent your company well.

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Goods shipping are hollering on the phone that they have run out of shipping labels and the re-order for the new ones has not arrived.

Do you:

(a)    Tell them to write them out by hand on sticky labels;

(b)   Tell them the person who usually does the ordering has fallen into the Grand Canyon and not done the re-order;  or

(c)    Get online and find a supplier who will deliver the new shipping labels at the right quality, right price and right now!

Pretty obviously the answer is c., but when you get online you will be confronted by hundreds of thousands of print stores offering you shipping labels yesterday!

So how do you choose which supplier to fulfill the order?

To get the labels on time and looking as they should follow these tips when ordering online.

First, deal with established print and design outlets that have a physical base in the country.  Many of the internet sites are glossy fronts for overseas print companies with many offering very cheap pricing because they are based in the Far East and especially China.  Your delivery will not be seen for possibly several weeks and certainly not this week.  You can check this by looking for a physical mailing address and a landline telephone number; if the web site you have selected shows neither, avoid them and move on to the next potential supplier on your list.

Second, online purchasing is becoming more the norm than the exception.  Modern online security is very safety conscious and you are fully protected in the event of mishap.  But you do need to make sure you are dealing with a print provider who is operating a retail website and has the necessary “back-end” to provide the security.  When you are looking at a payment screen on your computer, look in the browser bar where the website address is entered – you are looking for https://websitename.com – note that little “s” after http; that means it is a secure and protected section of the site which is safe for you to use with your banking and credit card information.  If it doesn’t have this – move on to the next supplier on your list.

Third, look for customer reviews elsewhere on the internet.  Once you have found a potential supplier, simply put their name into your search engine along with something like, “customer reviews” and see what comes up.  Bad news travel fast and furious especially if the company behaves unscrupulously or badly towards customers, so in this instance, treat no news as good news though it is always assuring to read positive comments.

Fourth, if this is truly a rush order, call the company up and explain the situation to them.  Be prepared to pay a little extra for the privilege but you can also negotiate with other business that you have too.  Shipping labels are something you are going to use again and again, so be sure to ask the supplier questions such as will the price be the same for re-order and what are the minimum (and maximum) order quantities they are able to handle as well as typical turnaround times.

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Winemaking became a passion when I got out of college. It was something I did for fun and friends and family really looked forward to a glass of my homemade wine. When the opportunity came to own a vineyard with my brother in law David, I jumped at the chance. We called it “Ruby Vineyards” because his wife’s name is Ruby. It’s only fair after all; he did find the vineyard and owns more than half of it.

Having our own vineyard has been exciting and we’ve just passed the first year mark for our business. We wanted to do something nice to thank our customers. We started looking at all of these elaborate thank you gifts like gourmet food baskets or engraved wine glasses – when my brother-in-law said, “Let’s make a special batch of wine, just for this one year anniversary.” That sounded really perfect. But we wanted the bottles to look different, not like our other bottles. So David found personalized labels for our wine bottles. We could add a message along with our logo and company name. It was all in full color and looked very professional. It was the perfect touch and the ideal way to say thank you to all of our customers who have stood by us for this past year.

The wine came out beautifully and David and I both knew right away this was a very special wine. We added the labels and started sending it out. On the labels we said, “Thank you for your patronage, celebrating our 1^st year. Ruby Vineyards.” Right away we started to get response. Our customers loved the wine! I actually had customers begging me to order cases of this special vintage of wine we’d created just for this purpose, something we hadn’t thought about.

The response was so strong from our Thank You wine that we’ve decided to add that vintage to our regular offerings. We call it our Anniversary Wine. I think we’ll make a different one for each year to thank our customers. From what started out as a simple idea, thanking our customers for their business has grown into an even bigger idea we hadn’t even thought of.

The personalized label was ideal because we could add a message without bothering with the fuss of a card. Both David and I were worried about what would happen if the card dropped off the bottle or somehow got lost. Then out customer wouldn’t understand why we were sending them a bottle of wine. We wanted to be 100% sure they knew we were sending this as a thank you. We also wanted to be sure they knew this was to celebrate our 1^st year in business. Both ideas worked successfully with the personalized labels that were so easy to attach to our wine bottles. They looked professional, and in full color we easily got the style we hoped to achieve.

Ruby Vineyards may be small but we are dedicated to making fine wine that people enjoy. I think that passion and enthusiasm shows with every glass. Salut and to your good health!

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