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From http://www.hamell.net/?p=435

I’ve been asked what seems to me at least a “large number” of times lately about what budgeting software I use. My answer of “Excel” usually leads to follow up questions about programming, or templates, or what have you. When i say “Er…no…none of that…just a spreadsheet.” eyes begin to glaze over.

So…thought maybe I’d run down a few of the different solutions I’ve seen or tried over the years, give out some links, and offer a bit of commentary.

YMMV (Your money may vary) of course.

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Spreadsheets:

I mist have tried a dozen different spreadsheet templates…and never wound up using any of them. I DID, however, use bits and pieces and ideas from several of them.

This blog post over at Christian PF lists 10 different free budget spreadsheets to get you started. Each is linked for download as well.

Of particular interest over there is the “Debt Reduction spreadsheet”. It’s a handy way to give yourself a visual image of your debt snowball. It shows you a plan, a table of outcomes based on various strategies, and even prints a payment schedule.

My favorite, however…and the one from which I generated many of the ideas in my own spreadsheet, is the “Detailed personal budgeting Excel sheet” near the bottom. This is actually a link to MyMoneyBlog’s “Within Your Means” budgeting tool…a fairly complex and detailed budget spreadsheet, but one that can really open your eyes…both to budgeting ideas and spreadsheet usage.

Financial Software :

Outside of spreadsheets, there are dozens of pieces of software running around that can help as well.

I’ll stay away from the “major” players like Quicken and MS Money, and instead comment about a few of the lesser known alternatives.

Quite popular amongst the “geek crowd” is GNU Cash, an open source double-entry accounting system. It’s light, fast, and available for dozens of OSs, including Windows.

One drawback is that GnuCash’s budgeting functionality is somewhat limited. Indeed, if you’re feeling just incredibly geeky and bored, you can read the nearly 10 year long history of budgeting functionality and debate in GnuCash on their wiki.

Ace Money is another popular solution. It has a “Lite” version that is free, but only allows management of one checking account….quite enough for many folks. It does budgets, tracks spending, imports bank data, the works.

Personally, I found its user interface didn’t seem to ‘flow” the way I thought financial software should…I felt I was doing things “out of order” quite often. The software IS pretty functional though, and offers quite a bit of the same functionality that larger, more expensive packages do. Certainly worth a look.

Finally, there’s a couple of fairly inexpensive alternatives with free trials.

There’s PearBudget, which is an online budget making tool. It helps you sort categories out into fixed monthly expenses, variable expenses, “once in a while” expenses, etc, and then prioritize and shuffle them around. It also let syou enter expenditures, tracks your spending, compares actual spending to budgeted plan, and makes suggestions. It even helps you plan your savings.

Personally, I’m not a huge fan of keeping my budget online, but the system itself is quite capable, and at $3 a month (with a 30 day free trial), it’s sure inexpensive.

Finally, there’s YNAB (You Need A Budget). YNAB is about as packed with features and abilities as you can want. It is a full blown “Quicken alternative”. Of course, it costs just about the same as Quicken…go figure.

I mention YNAB here for one very simple reason…the one feature that sets it apart from Quicken is its focus. both do essentially the same things, but YNAB views personal finance from a BUDGETARY standpoint, rather than a TRACKING standpoint. Quicken tracks what you do, and tells you about it. YNAB asks what you’d like to do, and tells you how good (or bad) a job you’re doing at it.

Note the difference here…Quicken is STILL telling you…after the fact…what happened to your money. YNAB is asking you to tell your money where to go.

Certainly, both pieces of software will do a fine job of managing zero based budgets, don’t get me wrong…but for YNAB, it’s a focus and starting point.

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Having said all of this, I should probably end by saying that there’s absolutely nothing wrong with simply writing down a plan on a piece of paper, and sticking to it. Remember….our grandparents (most of whom were far better at money management than we are) managed money this way. Shoot, if they had a register with neat lines and columns, that was pretty fancy.

Having software add, subtract, calculate, chart, and graph things for us is all well and good…and in my case it appeals to my inner geek. None of this matters, however, unless you understand the very basic point of it all…

You are not the government. You actually have to live on what you make.

And judging from the lack of panic amongst the always clueless MSM, you haven’t…

2009’s bank closures were a piffle compared to this year.

Yesderday’s activities by the FDIC brought the 2010 total to 108.

That’s right…108 banks have closed in 2010 alone…and it’s not August yet. Last year…the worst since the S&L crisis of the 90’s…had seen only 69 banks closed by this time.

Significant here is the causes the article mentions..largely defaults on commercial loans/property, the result of businesses closing down ‘in the recession”.

But wait…there’s a problem here. We’re supposed to be in a “slow but susteained recovery”, aren’t we?

Think about that…during a “recovery”, fueled by billions of dollars of non-existant capital “thrown from helicopters” into a flagging economy for the EXPRESS purpose of keeping bankrupt companies afloat, we’ve got companies closing at such a rate that:

1) 10% unemployment is the norm.
2) SO many commercial loans are going unpaid that a RECORD number of banks are closing.
3) Consumer confidence and durable goods orders are DOWN during the second busiest time of the year.

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What’s going to happen somewhere in the next 6 months or so is going to make 2008/2009 look like Disneyland.

Well…$1,470,000,000,000 in debt….THIS YEAR.

Yep…that’s right…we’re not spending $1.47 trillion…nono…we’re spending $1.47 trillion WE DON’T HAVE!

Awesome.

More bailouts…yes…that’s what we need!

Excuse me while I go vomit.

http://moneyplansos.wordpress.com/?ectid=bitlyified072320101419

Jason Ellis over at RandomStringofWords has recently told CitiBank to go jump. (Ok..he wasn’t that polite)

What? Card companies responded to ludicrous regulatory constraint with ludicrous fee hikes and policies?

NO
WAI

So here is an article about how hard it is to read credit card agreements.

Apparently, “average” Americans read at a 9th grade reading level (and people wonder why I tell my children average isn’t good enough in this house), and the average CC agreement is writted at a 12th grade reading level. So, you see, CC agreements are “unfair”.

“It is clear from your study that something must be done to make these agreements easier to read,” says Lauren Z. Bowne, staff attorney for Consumers Union, the nonprofit owner of Consumer Reports magazine.

Oh look…there it is. “Something must be done“. The cry of the whiner whenever he doesn’t like reality, and wants it “fixed” to his standard, but is unwilling to take his own action. Something must be done! HE won’t do it, you see, because he hasn’t (and can’t or won’t) thought through what’s actually “wrong”, the ramifications of changing it, or even how one might go about doing so…that’s for “others” to do.

The article goes on to explain why various experts think card agreements are hard to read (more on this in a minute), which cards are “best” or “worst” (I have to admit…I laughed that one of them has an agreement roughly 5 times longer than the US Constitution), avd so on. In fact, at one point, they even take a break to explain why it’s prefectly ok that people with 12th grade educations read at 9th grade levels…perhaps a post for another time.

The real issue here, however, seems to have been covered fairly early in the article:

“Credit card contracts and other such documents are written in dense prose for a reason: So that the customer will NOT be able to understand it,” notes Roy Peter Clark, a national expert on writing and a senior scholar at the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Fla

Uh…duh?

Really? Credit card issuers try to conceal the fact that they wish to play the master to your slavery? REALLY? Someone alert Ted Koppel.

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Of course, mentioned not once in the whole article is the rather obvious way to “solve” this problem…

Don’t use credit cards.

Amazingly enough, when you stop paying through the nose for the privilege of buying things you can’t afford to impress people you don’t like….you stop worrying about the conditions of doing so!

And that, really, is the whole issue here…

Credit is not a “right” or a “need”. It is a CHOICE one makes. If you can’t or don’t want to understand the conditions of your CHOICE, then…don’t choose that option! This isn’t a “something must be done” situation…it’s a “I signed a contract I couldn’t or wouldn’t read, and now I want someone to fix my stupidity situation.

Wah. Get over it. Pay your stupid tax, and stop entering agreements you don’t understand to buy things you can’t afford.

So, Pete Sessions, (R)etard - Texas was on MTP yesterday, and he was asked about the Republican agenda. He said that Republicans wanted to “balance the budget” and that we need to “live within our means”.

Ok…admittedly, I’m pretty fond of such ideas, go figure.

But funny thing about living within you means…it requires choices to be made. Barring a Bill-Gates-esque income, one simply can not do it all. The fact is that when one has X money, and the things one wants to do/have/buy cost 2X, then one must eliminate some items from the plan, or find ways to increase X.

That seems fairly obvious one would think…but apparently it is no more obvious to Pete Sessions than it is to any of the morons in Washington who got us here in the first place.

Not only does Sessions refuse to address the request for specific choices that would be made, he ignores REPEATED specific examples! He is HANDED the answers, avd is incapable even of simple regurgitation.

THIS is the ignorance and/or apathy (I’m unsure which at this point…perhaps both) that runs our nation.

Oh…and the best part? Mr. “balance the budget and live within our means” voted FOR the bailout.

FIRE
THEM
ALL

Yes..it’s worse than you’ve been told.

Click the links in the banner above for the details.

Elusive Debtors Foiled by Their Social Media Sites

So, guess what…folks who you owe money to will use Facebook to find you.

Really? You can’t be serious!

Yes…really. Guess what…you borrowed money…you owe it…they’d like you to pay it. And you’ve put your contact info online in a public place.