Month End Status - Not till next month!

It's month end and I still do not have a working financial management software! In lieu of going through what I did last month I am going to forgo posting net worth (I am sure it has gone down dramatically) and other savings progress till mid-month. Quicken 2008 was released this week and it is currently en route to me! I feel like a kid at Christmas!

I am sure it will take some serious time to get up, running and configured (and out of the damn shrink wrap) the way I like it.

It should be any day now....

Meet the Parents

Meeting the parents is one of the more critical junctures of any relationship. I know I wanted everything to be just right when I met Sophy's (my boo has a name) parents. To that end I did what it would take to impress and come off well to her very traditional Asian parents. Since I live in VA and don't have any friends (that I know well enough to stay with) in the NYC area, I knew that this weekend was going to be expensive, but just how expensive?

In case you have never bought tropical fruit before it was an eye-opener for me. It isn't like going to Safeway and buying a three pound bag of apples! I ended up spending $120.

Check out the table below for an outline:


















The weekend up in NYC after Hotel, Tolls, Tropical Fruit, Dinner and Fuel ended up costing me $654 - by no means a paltry sum. However, I was lucky enough to be asked to go to a client site in south Jersey the day before heading up to NYC so I was able to expense half the mileage up and back! This ended up saving me just about $150!

While I knew the weekend was coming up, I wasn't able to save for it because of the lack of cash flow I have been experiencing since moving out on my own. Unfortunately, I was forced to put dinner at the Chart House on the Hudson on the credit card (this is the first CC purchase in a long time).

I have to stay vigilant in keeping to my spending and saving goals so I don't erase all the good progress I made so far this year.

And in case you were wondering about the fruit I bought here are some clips below...

Dragon Fruit - Photo Credit

Jack Fruit - Photo Credit

Rambutan - Photo Credit

Durian - Photo Credit

20 Timeless Money Maxims

CNN Money has 20 Timeless Money Rules on their website this morning. I will spare you the whole list and give you my top five:

1. Be Humble - Know what you don't know and admit your mistakes....or you could do what all the cool kids do. Start a blog about it!

When you do not know a thing, to allow that you do not know it--this is knowledge.
--Confucius

2. Take Calculated Risks - I have always been been a proponent of taking calculated risks. Now I just need to get some more money to take some more calculate risks.

He that is overcautious will accomplish little.
--Friedrich von Schiller

3. Have an Emergency Fund - I learned this lesson the hard way when I was layed off from my job about a year and a half ago. I am still paying for this mistake.

For age and want, save while you may; no morning sun lasts a whole day.
--Benjamin Franklin

4. Practice Patience - Even the mortgage woes that we are facing now are only temporary. I am actually finding myself reading less and less about the day to day movements of the stock-market. A fortune cookie once told me - Patience is a virtue.

It never was my thinking that made the big money for me. It was always my sitting. Got that? My sitting tight!
--Edwin Lefevre

5. Keep Money In Its Place - Money is great and all, but it won't buy you happiness. It won't buy you time back with loved ones. This "rule" (if I can even call it that) has been at the front of my mind lately. Why should I work 60 hours a week when I can work 40 and make a decent living and have time for personal revival and time with friends. As soon as we start looking at money as the end, we start to neglect the relationships that feed our true sense of purpose.

A wise man should have money in his head, but not in his heart.
--Jonathan Swift

One of Those Days (or Months)....

Ever have one of those days (or in my case months) where nothing seems to go right? I have had been having that month for the past three.

Here is why the past few months have been less than stellar:

1. I am staffed on this uber-stressful client where I am being constantly ridden by my two main bosses. This situation is seriously making me want to quit my job and get an internal audit gig for a year or so. Public Accounting is not for me.
   
2. Cash flow is super tight. Now that I am living on my own, cash flow is tight because I am responsible for footing the bill for the whole rent, electric, etc. While I knew this was coming for a while there wasn't much I could do about it with respect to raising my money coming in. As part of my employment agreement, I cannot seek other employment outside of "The Firm". Since this job seems to occupy almost every waking hour of my day, I don't think I would have the time to pursue other employment.
3. Expenses are not regular. I was being lazy and this really landed me in a hole because I was eating out all the time right after my move. I kept putting off going to the grocery store because of the exhaustion from the job (see above). Also I am have planned to travel to NYC three times in the month of August. First was to meet my Boo's parents, next is to see my Boo graduate from Graduate School (this weekend) and then to go up to help her move down to DC with me (more on that later). Tolls, Gas, and misc expenses for all those trips tend to add up and don't fit really well into a tight budget.
4. It seems like every piece of mail that I get is some sort of bill. Today was AMEX, COX Cable and Fairfax County Personal Property Tax.
5. I have almost no idea where I am financially. Since the MS Money Meltdown I have not been able to measure where I stand financially. Being a person of metrics - this kills me.
   

So now you know why this month has been trying to say the least. Now you are thinking to your self, "That's great TMac, get off your ass and do something about it!" Well I am and here is what I am thinking as a turn-around plan:

1. Scale back my credit card payments to the minimum until boo gets a job and begin contributing.
   
2. Along the same lines, do not contribute to the 401K until the cash flow reaches the point of the "pre-move" days.
   
3. Pre-order Quicken 2008. This will help in helping me figure out where I am.
   
4. Begin looking for a new job. I am looking for something where the company won't consume my life. I don't see myself in auditing for a long time or in the DC Metro area for more than two more years so something that may allow me more control over my lift would be good.
   
5. Try to cut down on extraneous bills and expenses as much as possible.
   
6. Help my Boo find a job of her own!

What do you think? Questions/Comments?

Photo Credit - I remember when I was little my mom used to sit me in on the couch every night and read to me. This was one of my favorite books.

July Networth - Ohh So Late

I don't put a whole lot of stock in net worth as a measure of wealth, but I do value the exercise of performing the calculation because it forces me to address the amount of debt in my life.

Since my MS Money meltdown I have been flying without any financial management tool's help. I must say that the manual process of going into each account I have and noting the balance as of July 31, 2007 is a big pain in the ass.

The fruits of my labor were not surprising. My net worth went down like the stock market. I am currently running a net worth of -46,087 which means I lost 1.8% over last month's progress. Please see the net worth IQ graph in the sidebar for a visual.

This month was tough, I took about a grand from the girlfriend as a small personal loan to help keep myself liquid during the move. It ended up working, but I think that I am going to have some serious issues moving forward with cash flow due to me having to foot the new apartment all by my lonesome.

I think that I am going to switch to Quicken. Today I got a $10 coupon in the mail and commenter "adammm" was extolling the virtues of said program after my MS Money fiasco. How much different could Quicken be to Money?

Unfortunately, I don't think that August is going to be any better. More details to follow.

Photo Credit: Man's Daily Struggle

I Am Declaring Bankruptcy!

Ok. I am not declaring financial bankruptcy but I am on a razor's edge with MS Money. Over the past couple months I have been having an increasing number of problems with MS Money. As such my user experience has plummeted and my desire to play around with MS Money has dropped catastrophically. Hence the progressively later and later month-end update posts.

Several months ago I began having issues DLing my transactions from ING. For some reason only some of the transactions would pull across the internet and I would have to go through each transaction to see where the gaps were. Ok, I could deal with that. Usually I could identify which ones were more likely to get held up.

A couple weeks later my MS Money program just started to not work. I would log into program and almost as soon as I got my bearings the program would encounter a run-time error and automatically close. After opening and having it close several times in a session I would inevitably give up on it. I uninstalled and reinstalled the program about 5 times and cleaned out the registry since this issue has arisen.

Once I finally get a session to stay open, I want to get as much done as possible. Now I find out that none of my transactions are pulling across the internet and I have to manually type in each one. While working on this I try to apply a payment I have made to Discover but for some reason that account isn't on the list anymore. I do some investigating and determine that the best course of action is to reopen the account with a start date at the first of the month. Well MS Money says my account still exists. When given a link to the account it has the discover logo in the top left but it is the transaction history of my Corporate AMEX card!!

At this point I have completely thrown up my arms in frustration.

I give up. Screw you Microsoft!

I don't know what to do, I have the better part of 7 months of transaction data in there that I don't want to lose. I have been considering switching to Wesabe. Has anyone used it? Any expreiences with any of the lesser known programs (web-based or local)?