Apps and Tools

If there are certain things you need to remember and you have a smartphone, perhaps you should take a quick snapshot of it and leave the picture in your phone's photo album. It reduces the clutter in your bag — you don't have have to dig around your bag for strips of paper — and it's super easy to do. All it takes is one snap and you don't have to key in any information.

Apartment Therapy suggests to take pictures of where you parked, clothing sizes of all your family members, travel confirmation numbers, prescription pill bottles, and recipes.

Before keeping sensitive information on your phone, remember to secure it properly. It's advisable not to keep the most confidential data, such as your social security number and passport number, on your phone in case you lose it.

When you have time this weekend, try this email organizing trick to help you keep your inbox in good shape. One of the things that overwhelms people the most is having an endless number of unread emails to respond to.

This problem affects those who have a tendency to respond to high-priority emails right away, while leaving other less-urgent emails for later. As time goes by, your unread emails may build up because you just never found the time to get around to it. If this sounds all too familiar, you may be relieved to know there's an easy solution for this if you use Outlook — create a smart folder that automatically filters just the unread email. Here's a simple video for Mac users:

And if Gmail is your email of choice, all you need to do is enter "label:unread" in the search bar, click "search mail," and the results will be all unread emails from every folder. Go through the unread mail and delete ones you don't need and respond to ones that need replies.

Starting a business ain't easy, especially if you're working on it alone. Thankfully, there are a lot of handy tools on the Internet that will make your work life easier. Here are a couple you should check out:

BookFresh: Referred to as the OpenTable for small business owners, this online scheduling website lets customers schedule their appointments on the web and even make payments online. Using this tool will help you keep track of other details, such as client history and calendar syncing, and it will help you customize emails for customers.

Dropbox: Dropbox lets you store files such as photos, docs, and videos online, which means those large files won't take up space on your computer. It makes it easier for you to share files with others as well. Other benefits include accessing the files from anywhere in the world and the ability to access it when you're offline.

FreshBooks: Not to be confused with BookFresh, FreshBooks offers up a different service. The site helps manage invoices and automates several steps in the record-keeping process, making it easier for you to keep track of and create professional-looking invoices.

Read on for more helpful tools.

LearnVest talks about a new way to get your student loans: from the school's alumni.

It’s the newest thing in student loans: a social lending service where alumni can help finance the education of current students.

SoFi, a service brought to our attention by Mashable, lets alumni “buy a share” of the students at a school who currently have loans. As the students pay off the loans, the contributing alumni are paid back as well.

RELATED: Six Tips to Lower the Cost of College

Interestingly, Dan Macklin, the cofounder and VP of business development at SoFi, says that students are more likely to prioritize paying back their loans through the service because they know exactly who is lending them money.

Here is how it works, via Mashable:

“Alumni invest money in their particular school’s funding, and then students apply just as they might to any other college loan. Loans are given to students for a 6.24 percent interest rate (5.99 percent if they sign up for auto-pay), alumni earn five percent back on money they’ve invested, and SoFi keeps roughly one percent. Alumni can invest with cash or can invest funds through their IRA.”

SoFi announced Monday that it would expand to 40 schools after launching last year at Stanford. There is a student ambassador for the service at every participating school, and a social networking component where lenders and lendees create online profiles where they can connect to see career goals and course loads (lendees) as well as potential connections for jobs and internships (lenders).

Considering that student loans make up the bulk of debt across generations, we can’t help but think that any innovation is good innovation.

Check out these smart stories from LearnVest:

Quiz: Are You a Conscious Consumer?

The Ins and Outs of Saving For College

Update Your Life Without Breaking the Bank

Rude customer service flustering you? Don't fret, you're not the only one. According to the Journal of Service Research, one-third of consumers complained about receiving horrible customer service at least once a month. That's enough to get anybody down.

The study also found that those offended by the service provided are less likely to continue giving the retailer their business. Having just had an unpleasant encounter with a company's reps myself, I can totally sympathize with the upset customers.

Although we can't control the customer rep's behavior, we can now control another annoying factor of customer service — being put on hold for the longest time, stuck listening to the cheesy "hold" music. Introducing FastCustomer, an app currently available for the iPhone and Android that will help you skip the waiting time and get you to the rep whenever he's ready. Here's how the app works: you basically scroll through a menu of over 2,500 companies and call one via the app. The app will do the calling and waiting for you, and after it reaches an actual person on the line, your phone will start ringing.

What the rep hears on the other line is an instruction advising her to "Please press one for your next customer." This is one of the drawbacks of the system because the reps may hang up if they don't want to briefly wait to get to you or they are unfamiliar with this service. There are still a few kinks needed to be worked out, but this app definitely looks promising!

If you're always scrambling to figure out what coupons you haven't used up or which ones are about to expire, you ought to check out CityPockets, an online organizer that tracks your buys from daily deal sites.

The free website currently syncs with 28 daily deal sites including the ever popular Groupon and LivingSocial. I found the site pretty easy to use — all you have to do is sign up for an account, pick a couple of coupon sites that you subscribe to, enter in the requisite email and password for each site, and wait for CityPockets to start accessing your various daily deal accounts. Your deals will show up all on one place, neatly organized in categories, so all you need to do is quickly log in to CityPockets to print out your coupon when you're dashing out of the house. Using this web tool is so much more convenient than logging into various daily deal sites, trying to figure out where you bought the coupon.

One of the best services the site provides is to send alerts when your coupon is going to expire. And if you're not planning on using the coupon, you can even resell it in the marketplace.