Get your expenses in order before the holidays with free ebook Within Your Means: Financial Planning for Hidden Expenses. Writer Michael Ham rolled an ebook and an Excel workbook together into one hybrid financial management tool. In addition to learning about implicit and explicit costs, you interact directly with the workbook by entering your income, expenses, and goals. A series of interrelated Excel formulas slowly molds a snapshot of your current financial situation. An Excel workbook to help you create a budget that recognises not only your explicit expenses (rent/mortgage, utilities, groceries, auto insurance and registration, and the like), but also implicit expenses: the money you implicitly spend by gradually wearing out things you must replace (car, tires, mattress, TV, furniture, and the like).
I spent an hour going through the workbook earlier this week and was pleased at how well the workbook complemented traditional financial software like Quicken, Money, Wesabe, and Mint.
Within Your Means: Financial Planning for Hidden Expenses [Leisureguy's Storefront]Living frugally can be its own reward, but it’s also fun to promise yourself incentives for implementing money saving practices into your life. Life improvement site Dumb Little Man reminds us that frugal does not have to equal miserable, and suggests that rewarding ourselves with little treats within the budget (of course) can have a direct effect on our continued efforts to live below our means.
10 Smartest Ways to Live Beneath Your Means [Dumb Little Man]The 43 Folders blog has a nice idea for storing your new credit card details to make it easier to find and replace your online banking and automatic payment details in the future.
“Create an OmniOutliner (or text or Excel or Google Docs) document, and capture the name of every account, site, or other location where you needed to update your credit card information. Also, create a second column where you paste the exact URL for the page you had to visit to make your change.”
He also suggests using this document to keep track of the customer service phone numbers for your credit card company/bank.
The thing I like about this tip is that it gives you somewhere to track all those pesky subscriptions you sign up for, so you don’t get a nasty shock when that annual subscription you’d forgotten about (or meant to cancel!) shows up on your credit card bill.
Toward a hygienic credit card [43 Folders]
The standard advice for the size of an emergency fund is enough money for three to six months of expenses; however, that’s not necessarily an obtainable goal for many of us. Financial advice blog Wise Bread suggests that you aim for at least one month’s worth of emergency money to cover your bare-bones expenses, and have it stashed where you can get to it quickly in case of an emergency. One month is the minimum—it’s a good start on the road to the preferable three to six month fund. What tips do you have for those looking to build up an emergency money stash? Thoughts in the comments.
Figuring the size of your emergency fund [Wise Bread]
