I’ve never been very good at managing my finances. There was a period of time back in college when I lived off my credit cards. Fortunately over the last few years I’ve gotten better at living within my means and have been gradually paying off my debt. Despite this I’m not exactly what you would describe as financially responsible. I just switched to using my debit card for things and I keep an eye on my available balance on my banks website. I’ve known for a while (and to the urging of my financial planner) that I really need to put together a budget and start saving money.
In the past I’ve tried Quicken and wasn’t too happy with it, I personally preferred Microsoft Money but even then I wasn’t happy with the way Money handled budgeting. Consequently I never really used either one and continued to live paycheck to paycheck. After getting an e-mail from Quicken the other day advertising a 50% off sale on Quicken Deluxe (normally $60) I decided it wouldn’t hurt for me to give it another shot.
Last night I bought my copy, got it syncing with my bank and credit cards and made sure transactions were categorized correctly. I have to say that Quicken has improved a lot since the last time I used it. Today I spent some time digging into it a little more, got my reoccurring bills set up and started to look into the “planning” section of the application.
The way the budgeting/planning section of Quicken 2010 works is once you have your reoccurring income and expenses in the system you can choose any number of categories to “watch” like dining, entertainment or groceries. When you watch a category you specify how much money you want to allocate to the category each month and as you spend money a little green bar moves across the screen showing how much of your allocation you’ve spent and how much is left. It also has a larger bar across the top of the screen that represents your expected income for the month and it breaks it down into three sections “Scheduled Bills”, “Categorized Spending” and “Left Over”. That way you can see right away how much money you actually have to spend as opposed to how much is in your bank account.
Then just now, I noticed a feature that made me so happy because it’s the feature I’ve been missing from these sorts of programs. Quicken calls it “Rollover Reserve” and basically that means that if you don’t spend your allocated amount that month, the remainder goes into the reserve so you can spend it in the future or reallocate it to other categories. This for me is a killer feature. If I allocate $200 to entertainment every month I should be able to hold back and not spend the full $200 for a few months in order to save up for bigger purchases like an Xbox 360.
If you’re looking to get on track financially in 2010 I’d highly recommend you check out Quicken 2010. So far this looks like something I’ll actually use, but truthfully only time will tell. If you want to get the discounted rate before January 4th just use the “Special Offer Code” 6296962157 at http://quicken.intuit.com/.
I previously talked about reordering my Google reader in order to make my life less overwhelming. A little over a month has gone by and I thought I’d post an update about how it’s worked.
Things have been a tremendous success. By simply re-categorizing my feeds into Low Volume, High Value and Low Value [...]
I’m someone that likes to think of himself as pretty driven and goal oriented. I think this is why it’s bothered me so much that lately I’ve been floundering without any great direction. Some of it is probably the “Quarterlife Crisis” but it could also be that I’ve been getting lazy.
I firmly believe [...]
Today I logged into Google Reader and saw that I had 230 unread items. This is not unusual, nor it is particularly difficult to get through. However, that is what’s in my “inbox” between when I checked it last night and when I woke up this morning. I’m not sure how many [...]
Ever since I got my TiVo back in 2006 I’ve been a huge fan of it. True, it’s frustrating to have to attach the little infrared lights to my cable box, and although the DVR functionality works amazingly, many of the other features leave a lot to be desired.
Last year before I was preparing [...]
Today I was playing around with the Online Commercial Intention tool on Microsoft’s adCenter Labs. Just for fun I typed in a couple PHP content management systems I’ve used to see how they rank and came across some interesting results. If you haven’t used the OCI tool before, it gives you a ranking [...]
I was e-mailing a friend the other day talking about PHP frameworks. He’s been writing one for himself and I’ve written many many frameworks and CMSs through the years. I’ve also looked at a lot of existing frameworks out there like Zend, CodeIgniter, CakePHP, Solar, Symfony and I’ve come to a conclusion. [...]
I was recently tagged in one of those chain letter things on facebook by my friend Blake Hall. I’m supposed to post 25 random things about myself and then tag 25 other people. Well, I’m not tagging other people but I thought it would be fun to post.
So it seems this post falls exactly one month from my New Years Resolutions post. I thought I’d regale you with some updates.
Today I signed up for the Beginning Rock Climbing course at Planet Granite. I’m pretty impressed with what I’ve seen of the place so far. I start my first of [...]
So I promised folks pictures a while ago and hadn’t gotten around to it. Mostly because I was waiting until I got everything put away and cleaned up. But you know me, I tend to procrastinate. So I figured if I waited until I got things put away the pictures would never [...]
