Beating Broke

Personal Finance from the Broke Perspective

Money Management Software Changes

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As you’ve probably gathered, I’m a bit of a budget enthusiast here.  It’s a budget that got our finances back on track and it’s a budget that keeps them headed in the right direction.  Our budget tells us when we’ve overspent and helps us adjust to bring us back to balance when we have overspent.  For our budgeting purposes, we have a pretty simple excel-like worksheet that has our income broken down, and has our expenditures broken into categories.  We don’t get super-duper detailed, but it has enough detail that we know when we’re running low on budgeted funds for something.

For years, I’ve used a copy of MS Money to do our check register keeping.  For some time, I even tracked our retirement portfolios in detail.  I still use MS Money, but it’s recently been dropped from the Microsoft list of current software.  They aren’t going to make any more versions, and they are ending the support for it at some point.  So, at some point, we’ll need to switch to a newer software and from a new vendor. There are several choices.  Quickbooks is a business favorite, but I feel that it’s a bit too much for our personal records.  GnuCash is a free software, but is very similar to Quickbooks and for the same reasons would be a bit of an overkill.  The most likely choice is Quicken by Intuit.  But what version?

My first thought was to try and use Mint.com.  They were purchased by Intuit and the service was integrated with and finally replaced the Quicken Online that they offered.  The nice thing about Mint.com is that it’s free, and it’s online so you can access it from anywhere.  The service connects to all of your accounts and updates them for you.  They’ve got some pretty nice tools.  A budget calculator, and a nice budget worksheet that really are nice.  I might still give the service a try, but it can’t connect to my local Credit Union account, so I’d still have to enter a lot of the stuff manually.

And, if I have to enter stuff manually, I will likely end up purchasing something like Quicken Premier and utilizing it’s more robust feature set to do reporting and tracking of investments and such.  Another pro for having the actual software is that I have control over where my info is and can easily backup my files.  I’m sure that Mint is very secure, but I still get a bit leery about having one place that has that much access to all of my financial data.

What about you?  What software am I missing?  What do you use?  I don’t mind being proven wrong, if there’s a better software out there, let me know!

Disclaimer: The links in this post are a mix of affiliate links and paid links.  Neither of those facts changed the content of this post and the thoughts are mine and mine alone.

My Wife Quit Her Job: One Year Later

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If you’d like to catch up on this on-going series, start here, then go here, and here.  Then come back here and read on.

There, now that you’re caught up, you know that my wife quit her job about a year ago.  Sometime around last August, she and two of her friends (and ex-coworkers) decided to start a business together.  And as of the last update, you knew that the business was going well.

Now, the business is still doing well.  Better than most of us expected, I think.  On May 1st, they began working with the clients that the certification that they picked up allowed them to.  Because of that, all three of them should be seeing full time hours fairly soon.  My wife has been working full time and then some for several months, but everyone else has been relegated to doing most of the office work (that is unpaid).  That’s good for us, but wasn’t all that great for everyone else, or for business partner morale.  Unfortunately, much of what my wife does is limited to people with certain qualifications.  Qualifications that only my wife has.  And, until the business is able to help pay for the others to get those qualifications, she’s got to do it.  With the new program that they just started, that should become more of a possibility towards the end of the year.  Of course, if the new program continues to do well, it might not be something that needs doing anyways.

As I expected, due to the added insurance costs, and some increases in withholding for ChildCare, my checks are much smaller than they were in 2009.  We had planned on that, and since a lot of the extra is pre-tax, it will help us in the long run.  It is a bit sad to see your net income be less than 50% of your gross income though.  To try and compensate, I’ve re-doubled my efforts here and at my other websites to try and make up some of the difference.  Income is increasing there, but it’s a very slow process, and it has yet to be enough to make any significant difference anywhere.

Due to my wife’s increased work load, we’ve been able to keep up with our bills and haven’t had any major issues.  It hasn’t been good enough for us to return to aggressive debt payments, but we haven’t added much new debt either.  That’s a win if you ask me.

The rest of the year looks pretty good.  My wife’s business looks like it will continue to grow and, with any luck, so will my side endeavors.  I’m hoping that we might even be able to start our debt snowball rolling again.

Picking Yourself Back Up Again

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Inevitably, you’re going to screw up.  You’re going to make a mistake and it’s gonna cost you.  If you’re lucky, it’s only going to cost you a few dollars or a bit of bruised pride.  If you’re not so lucky, it could cost you much more than that.

Let me tell you a little secret.  We’ve all been there.  In all likelihood, we’ll all be there again.  But, some of us will get back up, dust ourselves off, and get back to doing what it was we were doing in the first place.  The rest will sit on the ground where they landed, beaten and broken, and never get back up.  They’ve given up.  The world got the best of them, and they have lost the will to try again.

Getting back up isn’t the hard part.  Gathering the will to get back up is.

None of us who have fallen and gotten back up have any greater aptitude for it than anyone else.  Sure, we may be better at some things than other people, but when we fail, we are all the same.  Here’s a little bit more of a secret.  Some of us are better prepared for the fall.   We’ve done what we can to soften the blow, not because it’s inevitable, but because it could happen.  Think of it this way; you don’t buy health insurance because your sick, (well most don’t) you buy it in case you get sick.  You don’t wear a helmet while bicycling because you know you’re going to fall, you wear it in case you do fall.  Sometimes situations are out of our control.  We certainly don’t choose to get sick.  And we don’t choose to fall off of our bikes on to the hard concrete below.  But, sometimes it happens.  And the better prepared you are for it, the easier it is to get back up and get going.

An example.

Many years ago (something like 7), I drove a old pickup (older than I am).  One particularly cold day, then engine refused to start.  It refused to start the next day despite having a charger on it and attempts to pull start it.  I couldn’t go without a car, so what was I to do?  I had no savings, and no means of coming up with any extra money.  I had fallen.  In order to get myself up and out of the hole I had dug, I was forced to take on a massive (for me at the time) car loan on a used car.  The bank wouldn’t finance much without a down payment, so I took what I could get.  It was a terribly low spot for me, financially.  I went from having no car payment at all, to having a car payment of a little under $200 a month.  I could afford it, but just barely.  If anything had happened to my income or if an emergency of some sort had arisen, I would have fallen that much farther (and harder).  To be honest, I didn’t learn all that much from that particular episode.  But, I did get back up and back on the road.

A week or so ago, my car sprung an oil leak.  The repair wasn’t horribly expensive (only about $150), but enough that it could have been very damaging if I had been in the same situation as I was before.  But, I’m not.  I’m prepared.  I have a small emergency fund that can easily cover an expense of that magnitude.  The fall wasn’t nearly as bad.  It wasn’t as bad of a situation as it was before, either.  But, because I had prepared, the fall was very short and I was able to recover quickly.  In fact, it was less of a fall than it was just a little bump.

Preparing for an emergency isn’t a bad thing.  It doesn’t mean that you are expecting to have an emergency any more than having health insurance means you’re expecting to get sick, or wearing a bike helmet means you’re expecting to fall.  But it cushions you against the fall.  Getting sick is less stressful if you have insurance that you know will pick up part of the bill.  You’ll have less road rash if you’re wearing a helmet.  And, if you have an emergency fund, more falls will become bumps.

Do yourself the favor.  Prepare now, so that when you do fall, you’ve got some cushioning to land on.