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

How does editing this month’s plan affect past and future months?

Each month is its own special plan, built off the previous month’s plan. Editing a month won’t change past months.

Let’s give an example. Say you were spending $200 on car gas for January through March, and in April gas spikes and you’re now paying $275, we want you to be able to adjust April, but we don’t want that to affect January, February, or March. We want to keep them where they were.

So you can edit any individual month’s amounts, but it’s only going to affect that month.

NOW … if you haven’t yet created the next month’s budget, when that month comes around and you *do* create it, it’ll use the latest numbers from the current month.

So … let’s say you budgeted $250 for car gas in December (because you had to travel), and then you make January’s budget. It starts off at $250, but you knock it down to $200. When February’s budget gets created, it’ll use January’s number, and give you $200 as your budget. You leave it for February, and for March. But at the beginning of April, you look at what you spent in March, and it’s $260. Yikes! As you make April’s budget, you might bump it up to $275, to reflect the higher prices. You might also then go back to March and fiddle with some of the numbers … say you had money in “groceries” that went unspent. You could increase the “car gas” budget for March by $60 and drop the “groceries” budget for March by $60, and everything would line up nicely.

For the record, we don’t encourage going back into past months to fiddle with your Plan numbers (like at the end of that example), but we recognize that sometimes it’s necessary.

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

Writing About Money for Simple Mom

I’m excited to share some news with all of you. The amazing blogger Tsh Oxenreider, over at Simple Mom, has asked me to join a few other writers as contributors to Simple Mom in 2011. I’m excited about this opportunity — Simple Mom is one of my favorite blogs, and I’m hoping my pieces will make it even better.

Specifically, I’ll be writing about money management for parents, with an eye towards keeping things simple and straightforward. I’ll probably be talking about allowances at some point, and I might stray into areas like “how on earth do we keep our financial papers and tax records in order for tax time?”, but I’m not totally sure in which directions my posts will go. They won’t be about PearBudget, per se, but they will cover some general ideas (“what is a budget, anyway?”) and give some specific, concrete tips. I’m totally open to requests, though, which brings me to my appeal.

If you have any specific requests or ideas you’d like me to explore, send me an e-mail (charlie@pearbudget.com) or a message on Twitter (@charliepark or @pearbudget) and let me know. And posts I don’t put up at Simple Mom can always find their way here. I really want to make sure my posts are interesting, and are on topics that readers want to know about.

Anyway, I’m excited about this platform for sharing the good news about simple finances, and wanted to let you know about it! Let me know if you have any ideas for posts!

Update: We were able to get the site up not too long after we posted this

Update: We were able to get the site up not too long after we posted this. (We don’t want you thinking the site’s still down!)

Many of you have probably already seen a few tweets from us about some downtime we’re having today. I wanted to post a quick note here for those of you who aren’t following @PearBudget on Twitter.

We’ve been working on optimizing the PearBudget database over the last few months. Mostly, this is a process of clearing out old accounts and their receipts, budgets, tags, and so on. The site has been noticeably stabler (at least on our end; hopefully it’s been working better for you as well).

Unfortunately, something is up at our hosting company at the moment, and even though we’ve been speeding things up, PearBudget is down right now. This is an issue on their end, and they are working on fixing it. We hope to have it resolved soon.

I don’t have an ETA on when it’ll be back up (hopefully soon!), but if you follow us on Twitter, I’ll be posting there with updates as info comes in.

I’m sorry about the downtime today. We’re working to get it back online as quickly as possible. Please let me know (charlie@pearbudget.com) if you have any questions or if there’s anything else I can help you with.

Pricing Changes for PearBudget

Just a quick announcement regarding PearBudget pricing. These types of notes are never fun to write. I’ll start off with the good news, then.

If you currently have an account with PearBudget, your subscription price will not be changing! You signed on at a certain price point ($3/month or $30/year), and we are going to honor that price point forever. Yay! Think of it as an early-adopter discount.

Next, for the sort-of-good news.

If you sign up for a new subscription before January 20th, 2011, you’ll still get the current pricing, forever. Yay! That’s a month from now, so if you haven’t yet, hopefully, you’ll be creating an account and checking PearBudget out. All you need to do is to sign up for a subscription before 2011/01/20, and you’ll lock in at the current price. (Note: an account is different from a subscription. An account is simply your data at PearBudget — your budget. A subscription is when you’re signed up to use PearBudget beyond the 30-day trial. So you’d need to sign up (that’s the account part), and also enter your credit card info (that’s the subscription part) any time before January 20th.)

Finally, the kind-of-good, kind-of-bad news.

PearBudget’s been growing (which is great), but we don’t want to lose the sense of personal care and attention that we’ve been able to give you guys over the last three years. We don’t want e-mails to slip through the cracks. We don’t want the servers to get overloaded. In order to keep our level of service high, and to make sure that the PearBudget backend is capable of handling you well, we’re going to be getting some help. It’s not going to change PearBudget’s simplicity, or our personal touch, but it is going to take some capital. So, for new subscribers (beginning Jan. 20th), we’re going to be raising the rates of the service, to $4.95/month, or $49.50/year. We’re sorry to do this; we hope that new subscribers will still feel as though PearBudget is saving them significant money compared with what they’d have spent if they were “in the dark”. The reports we get from our users suggest that they’re saving well over an order of magnitude greater than that each month (that is, each month, PearBudget helps them save more than $50 that they would have otherwise spent on things that don’t get them closer to their goals).

We looked at a couple of other ways to raise the funds for this, but we’re committed to not showing ads to our users, we will never ever ever sell user data, and we aren’t interested in taking on debt to finance our growth. Hopefully that resonates with you? The best course of action, then, is to raise the subscription rates for our new users.

To reiterate — if you’re reading this, you probably already have an account, and your price won’t be changing. If you’re a new user, you still have a month before the deadline to sign up and to lock in your price at the current rate. We hope you’ll take advantage of that.

In the next couple of days, we’ll be updating the copy on the site to reflect the new pricing info, but we wanted to make sure to get the word out here and on Twitter ASAP.

If you have any questions, as always, I hope you’ll e-mail me at charlie@pearbudget.com. Thanks, as always, for being awesome, and for your time with PearBudget.

Skype with us

We know that, sometimes, e-mail doesn’t cut it.

A few days ago, I gave you my cell number, to call if you have questions that are best served by phone. There are also times when being able to share your screen in real-time is important, or when you might otherwise need to do a video chat.

So … if you ever need to contact us by Skype, you can do that now. Our username is, simply, “pearbudget”.

We’ll be adding a more comprehensive “contact” page to the site soon, but, again, we wanted to mention it here (and on Twitter).

Let me know if there’s anything we can do to help you with your budget! Thanks!

Twitter love

We love you, too, Donna!

Setting up 2011 (part 2)

The other day, we mentioned that we’d roll out a page for you to use to set up 2011.

We’ve got it in place, at pearbudget.com/set_up_2011.

You’ll see a table with:

each of your irregular categories
the amount you spent on each category last year
the average you spent per month (and how many months that category was active)
a column where you can enter what you expect to spend in 2011
a column where you can tell PearBudget whether you want to carry that category’s balance into 20011, or whether you want to start that category from $0

We’re working on a few more tweaks to the Plan page for January, but we’ll allow you to edit that page soon, so you can see your 2011 planned irregulars in the context of your other monthly spending. We’ll post again, here, once that’s ready.

If you have any questions, please e-mail me (charlie@pearbudget.com) or give me a call (804.814.2064).

Thanks!

804.814.2064

That’s my number. (804) 814-2064. It’s my cell. Like, the number Sarah uses to tell me to pick up bread when I’m in town. It’s also, now, the number you can use to reach me.

I want to make sure that if you have questions, or if there’s anything else I can help you with, that you’ll give me a call.

I’ll be posting this on the actual site at some point soon, but I wanted to give you a heads-up.

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

Transitioning to 2011 (info soon!)

We’ve gotten a few e-mails from people asking about transitioning from 2010 to 2011. Lots of really good questions.

can I start 2011 with a clean slate?
will my balances carry over
what if I have categories I only needed in 2010, but not in 2011?

We’re working on some code to make this transition really easy. Our hope is that you’ll be able to just visit a page, check off a few boxes, and be on your way.

We’ll post in the next few days with more info on this. Just wanted to let you know that some more info is coming.

If you have any more questions, please don’t hesitate to connect with us on Twitter, at twitter.com/pearbudget.

Thanks!

What’s it worth to you?

In a recent interview, we were asked, “how do you keep PearBudget afloat in a world of free apps?”

It’s a good question. After all, people using PearBudget are interested in saving money, right? So why would they pay money, when there are free options out there?

The short answer is this: the return on the investment that our users get far outweighs the cost of their investment.

Think about the stock market for a moment. A good investment in the stock market is going to return 10% a year. That means that for every $100 you put in at the beginning of the year, you end the year with $110. Now take that same model and transfer it over to a budgeting tool. If PearBudget costs $3 per month, it would need to save you $6.30 of money that you would have otherwise spent to match that stock. (That’s the initial $3 cost, and to match the stock, you’d need to end up with 10% more money than you started, so, another $3.30.) We haven’t ever surveyed our users about how much money PearBudget saves them each month, but I know that it’s far, far more than $6.30 per month. In fact, although we don’t really know how she did it, one user said she recently saved $1,500 over two months by using PearBudget.

“Wait a minute,” you say. “That shows that PearBudget returns more value than it requires. But couldn’t I get the same results with no investment? Say … using a free spreadsheet?”

“Good point.” We say. But we’ve heard tales like the following, from Stacey T., more than once:

Hello Charlie and Sarah!

I just wanted to tell you how much my husband and I LOVE PearBudget. I read about it on SimpleMom’s blog in 2008. I signed us up for a free trial and we immediately found it very useful. We had tried Quicken and our own Excel spreadsheets in the past to keep track of our finances but each of those had their problems and didn’t seem to address the needs we had.

That’s what we really like about PearBudget. It’s simple yet it does everything that we need it to do. I personally love that I can enter in what I’ve spent and then have a remaining balance in that category. Often I found myself transferring money from one category to another at the end of the month to make sure that we didn’t go over our overall budget. We love zero balance budgeting and had never used it prior to PearBudget but we’ve found that it is the system that works for us!

We continued to use PearBudget through 2009 however my husband was laid-off in late 2009 and when it came time to renew our subscription for 2010, we decided that maybe we should save the $30 and do it ourselves in Excel. That was a mistake. We never ended up making a budget and so our spending was a financial feast or famine.

My husband just started new employment and we signed up for PearBudget again. We’re so happy to be back!

We’re happy Stacey and her husband are back, too! (By the way, congrats on the new job, Mr. T!)

Ultimately, it’s up to you whether you find a service like PearBudget to be useful or not. But if you’re avoiding it because it costs money, ask yourself whether whatever system you’re using is working, and whether committing to a service that requires a minor investment might yield a far greater return.

The expense of using PearBudget is small. But the expense of not using PearBudget could be an entire order of magnitude (or two!) higher. We obviously have a vested interest in your using PearBudget and subscribing. But you should recognize that you have an even greater interest — after all, it’s your money!

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