the PearBudget Blog

I’m guessing that most of you who read this use the web-based version of PearBudget. But there are probably a handful of you who use the (free) spreadsheet version of PearBudget. PaidTwice is one of you.

In fact, PaidTwice (who you might know as the head cheerleader behind the Snowflaking debt-payoff movement), just published a lengthy post detailing some tweaks she made to the PearBudget spreadsheet to make it work better for her: Get Out Of Debt: PearBudget Spreadsheet Hacks.

You can read the complete post over at her blog, but I want to mention one of her hacks, as it was something Sarah and I did a lot when we were using the spreadsheet: notes.

With the online version of PearBudget, you can use tags to help you remember the context of your spending: things like where you spent the money, why you spent the money, and so forth. But the spreadsheet version of PearBudget doesn’t give you cells to enter that metadata in. So if you right-click on a cell, you can add a “note” or “comment” (depending on what spreadsheet program you’re using). There, you can add in whatever notes you want to, so you can remember the details of that expense. We found that it was worth the 10 or 15 seconds it took to add a note in … six months later, as we tried to remember what that $250 in “car maintenance” was all about, having a note on the receipt was really useful.

Thanks for the great writeup PaidTwice!

Hi, friends!

If you’ve used PearBudget, and it’s been a significant help to you with your finances, and you’d like to be featured in an article or two about it in national media, please get in touch with us (contact at pearbudget.com). The sooner you can get in touch with us, the better!

As always, thanks!

Just a quick note. I got an e-mail a few minutes ago saying that our hosting company is going to be doing some server upgrading tonight. Accordingly, PearBudget will be down for about half an hour sometime tonight, between 10pm and 1am (Pacific).

I’m sorry for the late notice on this. Your account will be unaffected … just inaccessible for about 30 minutes or so.

For future notices like this one, you might subscribe to our RSS feed, or you can follow PearBudget on Twitter. Links for both of those options are in the upper-right corner of the blog.

As always, thanks! We love you!

Wow. It’s been a while. Hi.

We’re sorry it’s been so quiet on the blog. We’ve been working on a number of things for PearBudget: bug fixes, feature requests, and other extensions and enhancements that (we hope) make budgeting even more palatable. And there have been a number of super-nice writeups and mentions of PearBudget over the summer. And a few blogs have hosted PearBudget subscription giveaways, which we love. We wanted to share a link with you, though …

JD Roth, who writes the phenomenal personal finance blog Get Rich Slowly, has a piece up today that we wanted to share with you. The Budget Toolbox: 13 Tools for Building a Better Budget. He recommends (highly!) PearBudget’s web version and PearBudget’s spreadsheet version as excellent and simple budgeting tools, going so far as to call the spreadsheet “a detailed, polished work of Excel art.”

We’re big fans of JD, and wanted to share that post, and his blog in general with you. We’re pretty sure you already know about Get Rich Slowly … as far as I know, it’s the personal finance blog with the highest readership in the world. But if you don’t, please check it out.

There’s an excellent post from Jeremy over at Generation X Finance, Top 12 Money Mistakes Most People Make. It’s a really great overview — broad enough that it covers areas where we all fall short; detailed enough that it gives good links and action steps for rectifying problems.

Here’s the list, but you can check out his entire piece for the full story.

1. Not Living Within Your Means
2. Failure to Budget
3. Lack of Goals
4. Having Too Much Debt
5. Not Saving Enough
6. Inappropriate Amount of Savings
7. Lack of Estate Planning
8. Ignoring Disability Insurance
9. Lack of Diversification
10. Losing Focus
11. Being Naive
12. Not Asking for Help When You Need It

I know I need to pay more attention to my lack of estate planning, and I should also do some more research into disability insurance. But the whole post is good, and I wanted to share it with all of you.

Every once in a while, Sarah and I like to meet up with … well … you. We find a cool indie coffeehouse, we buy you coffee, we talk about budgeting (but we make it fun! the coffee helps!), and we have a good time. You don’t have to be a past, present, or future PearBudget user, and we won’t try to sell you anything.

We have some meetups coming up in the following places. If you’re near one of these places, we’d love to meet up with you:

• Arlington, VA (July 18th)
• Avalon, NJ (July 22nd)
• Philadelphia, PA (TBA)
• Richmond, VA (July 30th)

There’s also been a request for a Raleigh, NC meetup … if we can get a critical mass formed, we’ll make it happen. Get in touch if you’re in.

Here’s the thing: If you want to meet up, you need to RSVP, just so we can make sure we schedule it appropriately (some people don’t want to talk about their finances in a group, you know?). So e-mail us (charlie at pearbudget dot com), and let us know 1) what city you’re in, 2) how that date looks to you, and 3) if you’re okay meeting with other people, or if you’d rather meet up one-on-one (although there’ll probably be two of us (but we’re friendly!)). We’ll then work out the details with you.

Finally, we’ve had requests to coordniate meetups in Atlanta and on the West Coast. And while we might not be able to join you, we’d love to facilitate your meeting one another … and we’d still love to buy you coffee! So if you’re in Atlanta, San Francisco, or Los Angeles, please get in touch with us, and we’ll get you in touch with one another.

Can’t tell you how tempted I am to try to craft a whole post full of wordplay and mild double entendres, based off the concept of “international dating,” but I’ll spare you from that.

Last week we released a small feature that’s useful to those of you across the pond. Across both ponds, actually. Across all ponds, in fact. We’ve made the date formatting within PearBudget more flexible.

It turns out that in most places around the world, the typical date abbreviation puts the days first: DD/MM/YY. So “07/04″ is the abbreviation for April 7th … not July 4th, the way it is here in the States. We heard from a lot of our international users, requesting more flexibility around dating. (Again, the jokes kind of write themselves.) So we built that in.

If you’d like to change your account’s settings, just click on your e-mail address in the upper-right corner of your screen (once you’ve logged in to PearBudget, of course). You should see a spot where you can change your currency, and a spot where you can change your date structure. Don’t forget to save your account. And you might need to reload the page to see the change take hold.

It’s pretty straightforward, but, as always, just let us know if you have any questions or problems. (It’s probably best to e-mail us if you need help with anything … that way we can make sure we address your issues quickly.)

Thanks!

A number of you had noticed that, when viewing your receipts (pearbudget.com/receipts), when looking at past months’ data, you couldn’t always see your income receipts. Obviously problematic.

We’re pretty sure we’ve fixed that now. We’ll be keeping an eye on it, but if you see anything funny, just shoot us a note. Thanks!

Just wanted to call your attention to a post I wrote for JD Roth’s excellent personal finance blog, Get Rich Slowly. The article is all about unit pricing, and how you can use the grocery store’s price tags to compare different options and to save money when you’re shopping for food. It’s called Unit Pricing: Get More Food for Less Money. The comments that JD’s readers have made are excellent, and would be worth reading just on their own.

Get Rich Slowly is one of the premier personal finance blogs. GRS, along with Trent’s The Simple Dollar, are my two favorite blogs on personal finance. If you’re looking for good sources of writing about money and how to manage it, I can’t recommend them enough.