I have a problem with OCD. That stands for "Obsessive Compulsive Doodling." Bill at Credit Card Assist put together a very complimentary interview with me over on their site for their Best of the Best Blogger series – here it is: Interview with me. In the interview, I suggested that people at least ballpark their ...
Category Archives: budgeting
Boo hiss biweekly mortgage wrecks Christmas
Rats! Everything was going so well on the budget front for December and I was looking at a surplus of $1,000 or so on the $3,500 budget. Then I looked at the mortgage payment calendar that's programmed into my phone to give an alert. Payments due Dec. 3 (yup, paid that), 17 (yup, ...
The “One Big Envelope” Budgeting System
I can't do that envelope system thing. It just seems like work to me (note that I'm the laziest person I know) and I'm not sure what benefits come out of it other than juggling pieces of paper around. Yet I like to have self-imposed limits on my spending overall. Non-lazy people out there who are ...
Is Inflation Personal?
Several people in the comments of the Get Rich Slowly reader story that was posted the other day suggested that I was being a tad bit optimistic, perhaps even naive about inflation rates. According to the Bank of Canada inflation calculator here,: http://www.bankofcanada.ca/en/rates/inflation_calc.html inflation has averaged 4.4% from 1965 to 2010 and 3.1% from ...
2011 budget – what am I willing to work for?
I've drafted up the 5 minute "back of the envelope" budget for next year. So far, it's coming in at $38,000 in net income for 3 months of work from January - March and $33,000 in expenses which is good because it gives me a fudge factor of about $5,000 for "oh crap, the ...
Numbers tell stories – sometimes scary stories
If anyone out there is a finance geek like me, when you've been reading balance sheets, building business plans or just analyzing cash flows long enough, you start to notice that numbers tell stories. In the case of personal finance, usually they tell a story of what you value and what you don't value ...
Observations of a whole lotta people about to be laid off
Sometimes I feel like the worst sort of Chicken Little - The sky is falling! The sky is falling! But sometimes the sky is really falling - like at the contract job I just started at last month. I was hired to "wind down" this company one way or another - whether the company was ...