via ayjay, via Dry Creek Chronicles
W.E.A.L.T.H.
I was a little skeptical at first about today’s guest post at Get Rich Slowly (How A Haircut Led to a Handy Acronym), but it ended up being really good.
At the core of it is an acronym (WEALTH), which offers a series of questions to ask before making a purchase:
Obviously, it’s not saying that “just because something’s a want, you shouldn’t buy it,” or “just because there are add-ons that you might need to buy down the road, you shouldn’t buy it.” It’s simply saying that as you consider purchases, these are factors you should consider. It’s a good list.
You can read the whole thing here: How A Haircut Led to a Handy Acronym.
A nice frugal tip from Trent
A nice frugal tip from Trent, at The Simple Dollar:
Start a miscellaneous vegetables box.
We cook a side dish of vegetables with almost every meal we make, and we often have just a few spoonfuls of leftovers. Often, these wind up in the compost bin, but that’s not particularly efficient – I’d rather throw actual waste in the compost bin, not food.
Our solution is a clever one. We just stuck a small resealable container in the freezer. Whenever we have any sort of leftover vegetables, we just spoon those veggies into that container. When the container is full, we boil up some water, add some spices, toss in some diced chicken breasts (and some stock if we’ve got it), then add the vegetables and let it all boil together.
Boom – really inexpensive (and delicious) chicken soup that’s different every time you make it. You can thicken the water/broth with a bit of corn starch to make it more like a stew if you want.
This is a killer way to not waste leftover vegetables, add volume to your freezer, and produce a very delicious and simple meal for pennies.
— Freezer and Fridge Hacks: Seven Ways to Maximize the Value of Your Refrigerator and Freezer
Coffee in North Carolina?
This is kind of last-minute, and a total longshot, but we’re wrapping up a week at the Outer Banks (North Carolina) (specifically, Corolla). If any of you happen to be here, I’d love to take you out for coffee. Or, better yet, for a burrito at Donkey Hotay’s. Lemme know if you happen to be in the area.
Thanks!
Great Note
The other day I got a great note from a user named Jan. Here’s part of it:
I love PearBudget and it’s the only thing out there I’ve found that does budgeting like my Dad taught me on paper when I was growing up. I’ve looked everywhere and can’t even tell you how many budgeting programs we’ve tried. You’ve thought of everything and your program allows for many different ways of budgeting. I even purchased a year of Dave Ramsey’s program online and wasn’t impressed at all. Yours is far better than his and works right along with his program as well. Very impressed!!! Thanks again!
Thank you, Jan! We’re so glad PearBudget’s working so well for you!
PearBudget’s servers might be down this Friday
Just wanted to let you know that PearBudget’s servers might be down for about 30 minutes for some upgrades and whatnot this coming Friday. The service time will be sometime in the 9 to 11:30 (Pacific time) window on Friday evening.
We’re sorry in advance for any problems this might cause. Thanks for your patience!
Thoughts on the Printed Version of PearBudget?
We’ve gotten a few e-mails with requests that we modify the way that PearBudget prints out, so that it takes up fewer sheets of paper. Since Sarah and I don’t actually print out our budget often, we’d really appreciate input from people who do print their budgets.
Do you like it the way it is now? Would you like the print to be smaller, so more of your budget can fit on a single page? Do you have any other preferences for the printed version?
If you have any thoughts, it’d be awesome if you could e-mail them to us, at charlie@pearbudget.com. Or, if you’d prefer to answer this right here on the blog, you can do that in the field below. So: what are your thoughts on the printed version of PearBudget?
That Old College Try
As you probably know, we’ve built PearBudget to be friendly to people who’ve never mapped out their finances before. And this fall, hundreds of thousands of people who’ve never mapped out their finances before will be heading off to college. For the first time in their lives, they’ll be cooking for themselves, doing their own laundry, keeping their own schedule, and beginning to live independently from their parents. It’s a lot to learn.
As part of learning to live on their own, one of the best sets of skills they can develop is to learn how to plan their spending for the month, how to track their expenses, and then how to evaluate how they did (and to modify it the next month). PearBudget is an ideal way to hone those skills. And just as the first few shirts they iron will probably be wrinkled, and the first few meals they cook might be burned a little, it might take them a little bit of time to get a handle on their spending. That’s okay. That’s how it goes for everyone.
Anyway, the point of this post: If you know anyone who is going off to school this fall, we’d really appreciate it if you’d mention PearBudget to them and to their parents. With all of the other madness of getting packed up and off to school, budgeting is probably low on the list of their priorities. Hearing from you about PearBudget might help them move forward on it, and to take those first faltering steps towards good personal financial management.
Thanks, friends!
A No Spend Month
Before I post this, I want to be clear: good financial management isn’t simply about depriving yourself of things you want to get. It’s about being intentional with the way you spend your money. But, at times, you can intentionally set up challenges for yourself. So. Now that that’s out there …
Big congrats to Rachel and Doug (Rachel blogs at the marvelous Small Notebook), on the completion of their “No Spend Month.” Really impressive.
You can read her wrap-up of the month here: No Spend Month Update: The Final Day, but I especially like this bit, where she talks about how they wanted to celebrate the end of the month:
Should we go out for coffee? No, the coffee at home tasted better. Did I want a milkshake? No, I had a better smoothie at home. See, that’s the problem with No Spend Month. It makes going out and spending money not seem like quite as much fun, because the money doesn’t go very far.
Stopping spending is like going without sugar. It’s kind of hard at first. Have you ever given up a soda habit? I really like root beer, but there have been seasons when I’ve stopped drinking it. Later if I treat myself to a root beer in a tall frosted glass, it never tastes as great as I hoped. It’s too sweet. Yes, it still tastes good, but it’s not as satisfying as it once was.
It’s been a while since we mentioned the GoCards
It’s been a while since we mentioned the GoCards here. In case that’s a new term for you, your Gocard is a printable 3×5 card with your budget categories, and how much you have available for the month. It’s kind of like the pared-down iPhone version of PearBudget for people without iPhones. (If you know the “hipster PDA,” it’s based off of that idea.) Anyway …
We’d been hearing from some of you that you had too many categories to fit on your GoCards. While, in general, we think it’s a good idea to try and keep your budget categories simple, we can understand that you sometimes need to have a lot of categories. So we added a new feature, and you can now select, for each category, whether you want it on your GoCard or not. (As far as features go, this isn’t a huge one, but I’d been telling a few of you I’d announce it on the blog once the feature was live, so … here you go!)
By default, all of your categories are “on” your GoCard, but if you want to turn them off, just head to the Plan or Review page, click on the category you want to take off your GoCard, and open up the “advanced controls” (that gray bar at the bottom of the pop-up). You should then see the button to click to remove it. (We’ll hopefully be refining this process down the road, so you can control it all from the GoCard page. For now, though, we wanted to get the basic feature out there so you could start using it.)
Speaking of the category pop-up box … in case you hadn’t seen it yet, that’s also where you can now make your categories “inactive,” and they won’t show up on your Plan / Review pages (but if you spend money on them / budget for them in a given month, they’ll show up again … but just for that month). That way, you don’t have to delete unused categories just to get them out of the way.
We have a few more features (including one or two big ones) in the pipeline, but we always love hearing from you with more ways we can make PearBudget better. Please don’t hesitate to get in touch.
Thanks!