Archive for March, 2006
Does using financial management software make you wealthier? Does budgeting eliminate debt? The answer is no, of course not. These are just tools that help you track where your money comes from and where it goes. Software and budgets only help you become wealthier as they change your behavior. Using those tools alone will do nothing if they don’t provide an incentive for you to improve your financial habits.
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“If it doesn’t change your behavior, then it just doesn’t matter.”
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The financial tools we use should enhance our lives, not drain our time and create more clutter. Finance software should be really good at one thing – providing an incentive to increase wealth. (Is there really any other reason we’d spend so much time scrutinizing our finances?) In regards to the time we devote to our finances, we should waste less time trying to understand all the “bells and whistles” of our finance software and more time thinking about how to spend less and invest more of our money.
Sources: Getting Real book
March 30th, 2006
Scott Berkun, a project management and product design consultant, writes about the importance of being frugal; not with money, but with our attention. He explains in his essay, Attention and Sex, that we determine the value of something by deciding how much attention we devote to it.
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Law of lost attention: The value of something you spend attention on is dependent on how much attention you spend on it.
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I feel this if very applicable to personal finance, entrepreneurship, or anything we wish to improve or succeed at. If financial independence is a high priority, are we devoting enough of our attention to our finances so that goal becomes a reality? We can ask that question about any ambition we have to determine if it is really valuable to us.
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Cry-Baby movie full This is an excellent lesson for me because the time I spend on the important things in my life is often at the mercy of several less important things I try jamming into my day. Learning to focus my attention on the worthwhile will bring me the success I seek. In our day and age of mult-tasking, we divide our attention over many trivial things, and focus less on the things that will bring satisfaction and meaning.
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Sources: Attention and Sex
March 24th, 2006
Google just released a tool for tracking stock quotes, financial news, and market data: Google Finance
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. I’ve always known Yahoo Finance
to be the leading site for market information, but Google Finance might give it a run for its money (pun intended). For example, Google Finance has slick dynamic graphs for checking stock prices over time. Definitely worth a look if you follow the financial markets.
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March 21st, 2006
This year marks the 300th birthday of United States Founding Father Ben Franklin, who was born on January 17, 1706. A printer, statesman, and inventor, he was famous among other things for sayings such as “Time is money” and “A penny saved is twopence clear” (“A penny saved is a penny earned”).
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download Are We Done Yet? dvd He loved Boston, where he was born, and Philadelphia, where he worked and lived, so when he died in 1790 he left each city a sum of $4,400 (£1000) with the condition it remain invested for 200 years. When the cities cashed out the investment in 1990, each sum was worth more than $7 million, a testament to the power of compound interest. (These investments weathered the Great Depression!)
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Get out of debt as soon as possible, so compound interest isn’t working against you, then start getting compound interest on your side. The sooner you save, the more you’ll have in the end.
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March 20th, 2006
I read a post recently at MyMoneyBlog The Tattooist download How to Kill Your Neighbor’s Dog trailer Marley & Me download
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Love & Sex dvdrip National Geographic: Last Voyage of the Andrea Doria trailer I wasn’t sure how to answer that question. What does the word “budget” mean? I think for most people it means pre-determining how much money can be spent on each expense category per month; for example, $100 for food, $30 for entertainment, $75 for gas, etc. This type of budgeting is often compared to losing weight by dieting because, like dieting, it’s tedious and requires a lot of motivation to stick to it. It seems to focus too much on the “means” rather than the “end”, and that’s not satisfying. This is not the way I budget.
The Digby Biggest Dog in the World movie download Magnifique, Le full movie Another way to budget – the way I prefer – is to compare all your monthly expenses (out-goes) to your monthly income (in-goes) with the goal of being cash flow positive each month. This type of budgeting seems to be more effective because it eliminates the tedium of budgeting for each specific category. To stay consistent with the “losing-weight” comparison earlier, I would compare this second type of budgeting to playing sports as a way to lose weight and become healthier. Unlike dieting, playing a sport is enjoyable to most people, but can still achieve the same result (weight loss). The out-goes vs. in-goes method of budgeting, like sports, focuses mostly on the end result – win or lose. To simply see each month if I’ve won (out-goes < in-goes) or lost (out-goes > in-goes) is much more motivating and easier to stick to than the first method. Budgeting for each individual expense category becomes unnecessary because the motivation to “win” encourages me to manage all my finances responsibly.
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Which type of budgeting do you prefer?
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March 14th, 2006
I’m a Mac user now, but when I had a PC I used Microsoft Money. I used it for a couple of years, keeping track of all my incomes and outgoes. Sometimes I typed the entries, sometimes I downloaded them from my bank’s website, but each transaction always included the date, the payee, the amount, and a category I assigned it to. I prided myself on managing all the data so well and keeping it all clean — e.g. no derivative spellings such as Walmart, Wal-mart, etc. At the end of the year I found it fascinating to see how much I had spent at Wendy’s, or on shoes, or how many of the transactions were for the same exact amount.
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Cape Fear film But I’m not sure if all that data helped me much. I don’t believe complicated or even interesting reports made me a better steward of my money. I had tons of information but not much wisdom. That was the natural outcome of what I believe is a common practice for many people — copying their bank statements to a computer program.
What we need is wisdom, and it would probably help if there weren’t so much information to get in the way.
Do you pay yourself — putting aside a portion to savings or investment — each paycheck? Do you live within your means? Do you live frugally? Wisdom is to live these principles.
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March 11th, 2006
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Pay It Forward psp If you’re in debt, we want to help you get out. If you’re already out, we want to help you save and invest. Our goal is that everyone should be free of consumer debt and be saving, or especially investing, a portion of their income each paycheck.
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Get-rich-quick schemes are everywhere, but they haven’t prevented us from reaching an all time high in consumer debt and personal bankruptcies. While every retailer, car dealer, and credit card company makes it easy to get into debt, no one has made it easy to manage or get out of. We want to fix that.
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Getting out of debt is the baseline. Once you’re living within your means (outgo < income) and have paid off all your debts, you'll need to plan for your future. That includes both "rainy day" emergency funds and your formal retirement. Expect that you are the only person who will be responsible for your retirement. You'll need to set aside savings now to get there.
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But then for some, retiring comfortably at 65 isn’t ambitious enough. Many people want financial independence and the resulting freedom, and they want it soon. That’s unlikely to happen from savings alone. To really become financially free, you’ll need to make calculated risks, whether by investing in yourself (entrepreneurship) or by investing in other avenues you’ve studied out.
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Like other aspects of life, we can learn to be masters of our finances and free ourselves from them. Then we’ll have time and energy for more important things.
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March 5th, 2006
MIT has started a research program called SIMPLICITY Awake film One Night at McCools
. Their focus is “developing technologies for design—designs that are simpler to understand, easier to use, and, ultimately, more enjoyable.” Their vision of simplicity in design is right in tune with our goals for Firevalt, the financial managment web app we’re creating. Here’s an excerpt from MIT’s SIMPLICITY vision statement:
“[SIMPLICITY] is a radical reexamination of ways to break free from the intimidating complexity of today’s technology and the frustration of information overload. It is about inventing a future where less is more.”
“The vision of SIMPLICITY is one in which “simple” is not cheap or single-function, but rather elegant and easy to use. Think, for instance, of the beautiful iPod, which has less performance at a higher price than most if its competitors, yet still dominates the market.”
Read the rest of their vision statement here.
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March 1st, 2006