<$Monday, June 30, 2008$>
I Need a Better Budget
| It took me forever to figure out a way to track my personal budget electronically that my ADD-enhanced brain could handle. After trying out other people’s spreadsheets and budgeting programs, I finally found one that was simple enough to work for me. It’s just a simple, basic spreadsheet that I keep in Google Docs, and thus far, for the most part, it works. But it works for now because my finances are really pretty simple. Normally I tend to live by the rule, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” Just starting the process of buying a house, however, is beginning to give me a pretty good idea of how complicated my finances are about to become. So I’m thinking it might be time to consider upgrading to something a little more hard working in the budget software department. A popular one that I’ve seen a lot of people touting, but that I hadn’t yet tried, is You Need A Budget. I recently got a chance to try out a full trial version of YNAB Pro, and I’m pretty impressed. It has four categories: Register, Budget, Scheduler, and Reports. The Register section is for tracking your spending, and works just like a check register. I don’t know how good I’d be at using this feature, since I’ve never been able to get into the habit of using my actual check register. The big, ADD-friendly advantage this has, though, is that it automatically plugs the numbers into the “Spent” column of your budget and calculates your remaining balance for that category. That part’s pretty nifty, and saves enough extra steps that I might be able to get myself to do it. The Budget section is, of course, where you budget your funds. It’s pre-filled with every category you could possibly need, but just in case it missed one, it lets you add your own custom categories. It also lets you delete lines you don’t need so you can streamline your budget. For each month there are three columns – Budgeted, Spent, and Balance. Enter your budget in the first column, natch, and if you use the register properly, it does the rest for you. The only drawback of this section, from my standpoint, is that you can’t break it down into a bi-monthly budget. This has always been my biggest hang-up in trying to use budget software, as I get paid twice a month and have difficulty translating that into a one-month worksheet. The Scheduler could really come in handy for someone with ADD, or simply a tendency to forget stuff. You can schedule your payments, and when the time comes it will subtract them from your budget for you. If your bill payments are all automated, this could be really useful in keeping you from forgetting to account for a payment. Finally, the Report section is also just what the name suggests. It lets you view your spending by category pie chart or by column, and you can track your balances at a glance by a handy bar chart. To simplify things even further, you can import any existing Excel worksheets into the program, instead of having to start over from scratch (although it didn’t let me import a Google Doc spreadsheet that I had downloaded in Excel format). You can also import bank transactions directly from your bank’s web site. Overall, I think this budget software is all it’s cracked up to be. It’s streamlined, intuitive, and very ADD-friendly. I probably won’t be investing in a licensed copy unless/until they add a bi-monthly budget option, but if it already had one, I’d at the very least be willing to shell out the $20 for the basic version. In a nutshell, re: YNAB Pro: I approve. |
<$Thursday, April 10, 2008$>
Food, revisited
| I picked up some Naan bread the last time I was at Whole Foods, and last night I had it on my mind as I did some mid-pay period grocery shopping. Knowing I had to eat it soon before it went moldy but not quite knowing what I wanted to do with it, inspiration struck in the organic frozen dinner section in the form of a frozen Chicken Tikka Masala. I snatched it up, took it home, nuked it while my Naan heated in the toaster oven, put it all together and, oh, wow. So good. I wish I could remember the brand of the Indian dinner -- it had the word "Ethnic" in it, that much I remember, and the box was dark red with gold writing -- because it was as good as any I've had at Indian restaurants. It was filling, too, which means I got to put half of it up for today's lunch, and I've been looking forward to eating it all morning. It was a bit of a splurge at $3.95, but cheaper than a restaurant visit, and I don't regret it one bit. Speaking of which, back on the subject of the food problem: we've pretty much "solved" it by agreeing to cut back in other areas so we could increase our food budget to keep up with our standards plus inflation. It's not a perfect solution, but I don't have the patience/attention span to consistently do the coupons & sale fliers thing, and good, healthy food is one area where we're not willing to compromise. I think part of being frugal is learning to pick your battles. Decide what's important to your ability to enjoy life, and allow yourself leeway to spend in those areas. Cut back and scale down in the areas that don't matter as much. For us, this means we both had to give up a portion of our personal spending allowances, which was only painful until we realized that we usually spent that money on food anyway. I still expect, though, that our food bill will decrease after we move and we have a real kitchen of our very own. While I think life without the occasional Tikka Masala is hardly a life worth living, I'm also pretty certain that buying the ingredients to cook it ourselves will be less expensive than buying it pre-made. And that goes for the vast majority of what we currently eat. Labels: budgeting, cooking, food problem, shopping |