That being the case there’s big money to be saved through looking at wholesale apparel as the seasons change. Obviously you can’t run with the truly fashionable as seen on catwalk models but you definitely can do really well in terms of clothing essentials if you basically shop a year in advance.

One of the more easily overlooked things to tidy up is 5th wheel insurance. Sure, you’ll get around to cleaning everything out, but I’m sure most people just let the insurance on their rig just tick over from one year to the next. That’s just as much of a mistake as not getting quotes for your car insurance. More so in fact as you’re probably paying a good deal more on the RV insurance so there’s that much more to save.

Another more sensible option is to take a course on your disease. Although, so far, that’s mainly an option for the various chronic diseases, that situation is gradually changing as more universities are realising that people are interested in disease for reasons other than that they need to trea it. Thus, you can take quite in-depth courses on things like diabetes, cancer and cardiovascular diseases. Although these are available as entry-level courses, don’t underestimate the amount of medical terminology that you’ll need to get through in these courses and don’t let it put you off that many of your fellow students are paramedics and nurses.

Definitely a better option than the superficial internet search approach!

These days, it’s a lot simpler and there are lots of online printers who’ll handle things like postcard printing for you. Generally speaking it is things like postcards that stymie home printers as they just can’t handle card thick enough for postcards. Photos are generally fine these days (though expensive on home printers) but if you’d like a really large enlargement or something on canvas then you’ll generally need to do this via an online outfit as few home printers can handle odd papers or really large ones.

And none of this is anything like as expensive as it used to be. A high quality poster sized print is under £20 these days.

Whilst it’s not so bad for household items, when you start trying to collect things together in the garage you really need to start considering things like stainless steel drums to avoid all the problems that chemicals can cause very easily.

Of course, once you’ve everything in those drums you may well have the problem that you’ve nowhere left to park the car…

One of the problems with such filing is that there’s rarely a computer record maintained over the years as, frankly, it’s not realistic to do that over what could potentially be a period stretching over many decades. Think about the changes that even your own personal computer systems have gone through over the last 30 years or so. Back in the mid 70s chances were that you would have one of a number of totally incompatible systems but let’s assume that you were lucky in your choice and chanced upon one of the two standard systems of that era. You’d have chosen either an Apple 2 or something based on CP/M. If you’ve any discs from then, you wouldn’t be able to read them with todays equipment as 8″ floppy drives haven’t been available for decades.

But suppose you copied them onto the latest IBM PC system when that came out in the early 80s. There at least you would be ahead as you can still get systems that’ll read the 3.5″ discs introduced by the mid-80s. However, if you merely copied your Visicalc spreadsheets or Wordstar documents you’d not be able to read them in Excel or Word unless you’d converted them into 123 or an early version of Word as used on the IBM then. Even Excel and Word are themselves a problem as they used a number of different file formats over the years.

Thus ye olde filing systems use paper.

For that you need to start trawling through the camcorder reviews where you’ll come across a whole new world of acronyms and technologies. However, it’s not nearly so complicated as it first appears.

To begin with you need to think about whether you want to use a card, DVD or tape based camcorder. The DVD ones get quite bad press sometimes basically because not all DVD players can cope with the small DVDs that these camcorders use and there’s the issue about how long they could be expected to last. The tape based ones have been around a long time and use the miniDV standard which will hold about an hour of video. They’re larger than the card based devices and you’ll need to use cables to copy the movies on to your computer.

The other consideration is whether to use standard or HD video. In practical terms there’s not much of a difference in cost these days and HD will almost always be your best choice. This will use up more cards but doesn’t require any space on the tape as compression is used with the miniDV standard.

Finally, there’s the issue of what to do with the used media. With miniDV you may as well keep the original tapes as they’re very cheap but the cards can become quite expensive. If the only copy you’re keeping it that on your computer, don’t forget to keep backup copies as otherwise you’re sure to lose your movies at some point in the future.

Of course, the problem is that there are many different reasons why things are collected and kept. I still have the stress ball from an IT convention from many years ago largely because it was the only time I’ve been to a place giving those out: it was unique. A few years ago I remember one stand being swamped because they had cute little pens and those were kept for a while ’til the likes of IKEA started handing similar things out: another unique item. Then there’s the personal reasons: I still use the promo keychains or rather keychain, singular, given with the £60,000 computer system I bought almost 15 years ago basically as a reminder of how daft the procurement people were at that time. I’m quite sure it’s the most expensive keyring in our street!

That unique quality is something worth searching for in items that you give away but requires you to move outside the standard catalogues and make that little bit more effort.

Whilst I don’t have any problems changing between the Canon camera and the Nikons, when I try to take a photo on the Fujis it just never seems to turn out quite as I was expecting it to. Oh, the menus are different for sure but the cameras are basically set up for point and shoot so you’d think that would work quite well. Still, at least it makes Wendy’s camera hers and mine, mine

Thus we found out that car insurance in France is cheap essentially because the level of service is far below that of even the cheapest car insurance company in the UK. An accident in France that would be considered a complete write-off would be repaired in the UK and there’s none of the hassle level associated with a French car insurance claim either.

Fortunately most of us never need to find out just how good our car insurance really is but it’s worth checking out a few review sites before parting with cash as sometimes you can get quite a big improvement in the level of service by paying just a little bit more.