The PearBudget Blog | The simplest budgeting tool on the internet.

Having Trouble Logging in On the iPhone?

We’ve had a lot of e-mails recently from users who’ve had trouble getting in to their PearBudget accounts on their iPhones.

“I entered my password,” they write, “and it wouldn’t let me in. What’s going on?”

Ack. That’s terrible! Nobody wants to be cut off from their account. Weirdly, though, this isn’t a bug with PearBudget, but, actually, a bug with the iPhone.

For some reason, when the iPhone has been updating its software recently, a “remember that I’m logged in” setting has been getting turned off.

Here’s how to fix it:

On your iPhone, go into the “Settings” app (it’s the one with the icon that looks like gears). Flick down until you get to the “Safari” menu item, and select it. Then, look for the “Privacy” section and find the “cookies” setting. It should read either “all” or “from visited” (I have mine set to “from visited”).

I’ll try to add some screenshots over the next few days, but I wanted to make sure that I had this posted, in case any of you are running into the issue and need to resolve it.

If that didn’t answer your question, get in touch with us by e-mail, at help@pearbudget.com.

2012 transition page is now available!

The 2012 transition page is now available at:

https://pearbudget.com/set_up_2012

This page will allow you to plan for the amounts you plan to spend in each of your irregular categories, and also to start over fresh in any or all of those categories if you’d like to do so. We apologize for the delay in getting the page up. (There’s lots of exciting behind the scenes things going on that should provide some exciting new features in 2012!)

If you run into any problems with the page or setting up for 2012, please send us an e-mail at help@pearbudget.com, and we’ll get right back to you!

Just A Quick Update on the 2012 Transition

Update to below post:

The 2012 page is now available:

https://pearbudget.com/set_up_2012

We apologize for the delay!

——————————————

We know 2012 is coming down the road pretty quickly. We just wanted to give a quick note that we’re working on the “transition to 2012” page, and that we hope to have it up very soon. It’ll allow you to start 2012 from scratch, so that if your numbers have gotten a little off over the last few months, or if you’ve taken a break and want to get back into budgeting, or if you just want to start your budget over for some other reason, you’ll be able to do so easily.

In the meantime, if you have any questions, just send us an e-mail at help@pearbudget.com, and Ruth or I will get back to you ASAP. Thanks!

Help Save Our Friend’s Life

This post isn’t really about budgeting, but we hope you understand.

We need your help.

Amit Gupta

A good friend of ours, Amit Gupta, has a very serious case of Leukemia. If he doesn’t find a bone marrow match and get a transplant soon, he will die. And “soon” isn’t, like, “some time in the next year.” We have three days from now to get entries into the system to save his life.

Now, if Amit were caucasian, his odds of finding a match would be pretty good. Four out of every five caucasians who get Leukemia can find a match. Amit’s family’s Indian, though. That means his odds are A LOT worse. As in, only ONE South Asian in every TWENTY THOUSAND who has Leukemia will have a match in the registry.

I really want Amit to be that one. Or, more honestly, I want to increase those odds, so a *lot* of South Asians can be “that one,” and I want Amit to be one of them.

Getting registered is really easy, and painless, and free. I got registered over a decade ago, back when you had to have blood drawn. Nowadays, getting into the registry is as simple as ordering a kit online (it’s free), swabbing your cheek with a Q-Tip thing, and then mailing it back in (again, totally free). To order a free swabbing kit, just go here: http://bethematch.org/. There’s also a list of bone marrow swab drives in different cities around the world, if that works better for you.

So here’s the deal. If you order a kit and send it back in (even if you never end up being a match for anybody), we’ll give you a month of free PearBudget coverage.

If you’re of South Asian descent (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan, Maldives, or Sri Lanka) and you submit a swab kit to the registry, we’ll give you a free year of PearBudget coverage. If you have a friend who’s South Asian and you get them to submit a kit, you get the same deal. In fact, we’ll give you a year for every South Asian friend you get into the Bone Marrow Registry.

Even if you just post the following to Twitter, we’ll give your subscription a free week’s credit: “PearBudget’s trying to save a life and is giving away free budgeting software: http://blog.pearbudget.com/help-save-our-friends-life”

Basically, our goal is to get a lot of folks with South Asian bone marrow into the registry, and we need your help to do it. Help us out, help save Amit’s life, and get free PearBudget credit in the process. Check out Amit Gupta Needs You or send an e-mail to me (charlie@pearbudget.com) if you have any questions.

Thanks, friends, for any help you can give us.

Saving for College?

Hey, friends! I wanted to share a post I wrote last week over at Simple Mom. If you have kids and are thinking about saving for college, it might be a good one to check out. 529s and ESAs — The Nitty-Gritty of Saving for College.

How to Teach Your Kids About Money

I loved this piece on teaching kids about money: My dad taught me cashflow with a soda machine. While I don’t know that it’s a super-practical method for most people, it seems like a great way to teach things like how to invest your money, how to handle lean times, how to handle times of prosperity, and how to account for hidden costs that are easily forgotten, but that add up over time. It’s a fun, quick read.

New feature for October

Based on lots of customer feedback, we’ve just added another new feature to PearBudget. You can now start your budget on any day of the month. So your budget can run from Oct 19-Nov 18, or Oct 3-Nov 2, or whatever works best for you! You can change your start date by clicking on the “your account” link up in the right hand corner of any PearBudget screen. We’d love to hear how this feature works for you; our e-mail address is help@pearbudget.com.

New date/time feature

I’m excited to announce another new feature in PearBudget especially for our international users! Under “Your Account” you can set your current date and time so you are no longer stuck on United States Eastern time. You should just be able to click on the link for “your account” in the upper right hand corner of any PearBudget page, and then you can change the date/time to your current time. We just rolled this out yesterday, so we’d love any feedback you have, especially if something doesn’t work the way you expect it to.

A New Calendar, and Text Inputs for International Users

We love our international users. We’ve been sad, then, that they’ve had a second-rate date input option for when they needed to enter receipts. If you never saw the “Enter a New Receipt” page that international users saw, you’re pretty lucky. It had those dropdown boxes for the day, and month, and year, and it was hard to navigate with just a keyboard, and they didn’t get the clickable calendar view, and … well … it wasn’t great.

We wanted it to be great.

So we’ve overhauled the Enter a Receipt process for those of you who are international users, and we’ve added in a calendar option for you. You still enter in receipts with a DD/MM/YY format (so, for example, today is 15/6/11). We hope it serves you well.

While we were working on this, we also upgraded the calendar for everybody So where you used to see a calendar that looked like this:
A screenshot of the old calendar interface.

It now looks like this:
A screenshot of the new calendar interface.
(The screenshot doesn’t show it, but when you’re highlighting a date, the background is bright green.)

There are a few bonus features this calendar gives you, and a few keyboard commands you can give it, if you’re so inclined.

page up/down – previous/next month
ctrl+page up/down – previous/next year
ctrl+home – current month or open when closed
ctrl+left/right – previous/next day
ctrl+up/down – previous/next week
enter – accept the selected date
ctrl+end – close and erase the date
escape – close the datepicker without selection

If you have any questions or comments, just get in touch! And if you uncover any bugs or any other bits and pieces that don’t work like you expect them to, don’t hesitate to let us know.

A New Blog!

So … this is our new blog. If you’re getting this via the RSS feed, our new address is blog.pearbudget.com (we’d love for you to come check it out!).

We’re still making a few tweaks here and there, but we’d love to get any feedback you have on how we can make the blog better, more useful, easier to search, and so on.

Also: Are there any articles you’d especially like for us to write? Any questions you want us to answer? Just let us know!

Thanks!

PearBudget beautiful, simple budgeting. (This is our blog.)