it’s raining hearts, Hallelujah!
Originally uploaded by bamzin
And it’s Friday, Hallelujah! It’s been a crazy week for me, and I’m happy to see it come to a close.
My dissertation defense is coming up in two weeks and five days, and frankly, I haven’t been this nervous about anything in recent memory. I guess it’s largely because I’ve been working on my PhD for so long, and now it’s time for the Reckoning.
Inspired by Matthew Cornell’s post on combining daily planning with an accountability partner, I had been doing the same for a while. I found that it worked really well. I telecommute, and most of the day I don’t directly interact with anyone, much less people from work that might hold me accountable. Just knowing that at the end of the day, I had someone to report to on how I stuck to my plan, made a huge difference in my discipline. However, it didn’t work out for my partner — he wasn’t getting the same benefits that I was.
As a result of some conversation in the comments of another of Matthew’s posts, I decided to get a domain and start up a simple site (didyoudo.it) for finding accountability partners. It took a little finagling to get an Italian domain name, but I owe one of my fellow graduate students a case of beer for the effort he undertook to get the domain for me. It seems you must be a European citizen to get an Italian domain name, and they require arcane things like faxing signed forms and so on. I think the name has a nice ring to it.
So far the site hasn’t really gotten much traffic. One guy found it via my Tweets on the subject and we just started the accountability partner thing today (yay!), so in a sense it’s been a successful venture. On the other hand, I had grander visions for the site. I wonder if I should broaden the focus a bit from productivity-related accountability partners to any accountability partners? There’s a major Christian accountability scene, and I didn’t really want them to dominate the board, but maybe it’s not worth worrying about.
Have you ever thought about working with an accountability partner? If you want to, and you feel like you’ve got a good grasp on your productivity otherwise, come post something at didyoudo.it. If you want a little more coaching, I understand that Matthew does a telecoaching series on daily planning and accountability. It might help get you off to a good start before you find your own accountability partner.
(Disclosure — this post is about budgeting and mentions my Android app for doing the same, so take that as you will.)
How do you budget your spending?
Apparently my way of doing it is strange –here’s what I do. I know my annual salary, and I know my paycheck amounts (after taxes), and all of the other relevant income numbers. I also know my recurring expenses — the mortgage, food, utilities, day care, and so on. (I break those into needs and wants as well, but it’s not really important for this post.) For the sake of simplicity, you can assume that I include my savings, Roth IRA contributions, etc, in the tally of recurring ‘expenses’.
When I subtract my recurring expenses from my income, I get my discretionary income. I have it in annual, monthly, weekly, and per-paycheck increments.
How do I budget that part out? Apparently the normal way to do that is to plan how much to spend on this and that, and then try to stick with it. Track expenses in each category meticulously, make sure everything adds up. That’s too much overhead, and I’ll never stick to it. Instead, I say to myself, “Self, you’ve got $200 to spend and you’ve got to make it last a week. If you run out before then, you’re out of luck.” The relevant numbers, then, are how much time I have left in my budget period, and how much money I have to cover it. I trust myself to look at my wallet and, based on those numbers, decide whether I can afford to go out to eat tonight, or order that book or electronic gizmo.
That worked when I spent most of my money in person. However, these days I spend most of my discretionary funds online, via a credit card. I’m not keen to use something like Mint.com (imagine if someone hacked Mint.com — they’d have all of your login information for all of your accounts — a single point of failure), and I don’t think it would let me do what I need to do anyway. One option is to have an amount of cash equal to my weekly budget, and set any aside that I’ve spent online. Then I could take it back out and supplement it from my bank account when my budget rolled over. That’s what I did for a while.
A second option is to keep a little notebook and tally expenses. I think that’s actually a great option, but I don’t like carrying a notebook and pen with me. I would prefer not to carry anything extra.
However, I am always carrying my Android phone. As such, I decided to write a little program for it that tracks my monthly and weekly budgets, and allows me to subtract from them by spending an arbitrary amount. On the weekly and monthly budget reset dates it resets and optionally rolls over any remaining amounts or amounts over-budget (as negative amounts).
So far it doesn’t seem to be a very popular app. It was suggested to me that that was because nobody budgets this way. Is it so strange? How do you budget?
Valentine’s Day
Originally uploaded by marb75
It’s not Valentine’s Day, but that’s the title of the picture. Happy Friday everyone, and happy 4th of July (Independence Day) to my American readers!
SpendingCash 0.3
I have tracked, using a spreadsheet, my disposable income for at least five years. I used to take out my weekly budget in cash every week, but now I work at home and so most of my spending is online via credit cards. I wanted something that would let me track how much of my budget I had left and tell me how long I had to stretch that money.
My first thought was to produce some sort of thin, credit-card-sized device that would do it, but I realized that would be too time consuming and expensive. Instead, I wrote this simple Android app. After all, I pretty much have my phone with me at all times, so I’d never be far from entering my expenditures.
I hope that there are people out there that have a similar need and are willing to pay $1 to have that need met. The first 24 hours have not been promising, but in the end I have an app that I like, and I guess if people eventually try it and decide they like it as well, it’ll be a little extra spending cash for me.
I made a simple site for the app: SpendingCash
Would this sort of thing interest you? Why or why not? Do you think it’s worth $1?