So . . . I’m not an accountant.
I’m trying to get a better handle on my “spending cash” which is managed through my personal account and credit cards. Most “needs” type expenses are covered through our joint finances, so the personal account is mostly discretionary. The problem is I want to reduce my personal credit card debt, and these days the personal account doesn’t get much money to play with, which means I need to be smart and aware with my discretionary income.
About a decade ago I tried managing my spending by writing the date on a series of $20 bills. If I was breaking a bill with today’s date on it, things were going alright. If I was breaking yesterday’s date, I was doing well, and if I was spending a bill with a future date on it . . . well, time to cut back, eh?
This time around I’m thinking to allow myself $10/day. ATMs don’t give out tens, and these days I make some small purchases with the credit card, so I’ll try a different solution: a Google Spreadsheet!
I thought it might be neat to share the progress here, in case other folks are curious to see how this experiment works. You should be able to see the results tally up over the course of the month on the right.
This is by no means a comprehensive thing: I’m not tracking automatic withdrawals (charity, web hosting) or interest on the cards: I’m merely trying to keep my personal spending (the “burn rate”) in check by maintaining an awareness of what’s up. This is pretty much lunch money, small gifts, and entertaining the sweetheart. My rule is going to be that any personal spending I have to initiate I will track. So, I’ll count the $50 mobile phone bill, for the sake of a healthy challenge.
Technical note: I don’t know for spreadsheets, but the formula for setting up the balance column was to start at cell D3 with this formula:
=IF(A3="",,SUM(D2+C3))
This basically means that if the date (A3) on this row is filled in, add the amount (C3) to the previous total (D2). I was then able to “copy” that cell, multi-select all the cells below, and “paste” and the formula got updated each row, as my Excel Guru colleague expected.
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It is Friday . . .
See also, February 9. Some have since rearranged.
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The shadows grow long as commuters await the last Eastbound ACE train of the day, at Great America station.
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Mission St at Yerba Buena, San Francisco
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As viewed from very high.
Another town, another party, another rooftop view . . .
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Another gem from the Atherton Police Blotter . . .
2:26 p.m. — Caller says two high school girls are walking along, waving at passing cars, and she’s afraid someone unsavory will approach them, Middlefield and Encinal.
Something tells me that high school girls are just as likely to be approached by someone unsavory without waving at passing cars. But my perspective is biased, as I am one of those creepy guys who likes to smile at strangers.
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Maggie frolics outdoors during a break in the rain.
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Treasure Falls, in Colorado.
Sorta works with the wet weather we have been having.
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I have been concerned that as Yahoo decays, that Flickr may at some point no longer remain a good place to host my photos. I do wish someone would create a competing service which supported the API. Some kid made Zooomr a few years ago, which was to sport a feature-complete Flickr API, but as best I can tell the kid moved to Japan and lost interest in Zoomr, which remains an abandoned stepchild.
Picasa? The desktop client is kind of neat but I don’t much like the web interface. It feels like another one of those one-offs Google bought but then had no idea what to do with it. Anyway, it’s just not my thing.
So, I took a look at SmugMug, who have been trying to lure Flickr refugees, but the consensus seems to be that if you like Flickr, SmugMug can not approximate Flickr. (The biggest concern for me is the loss of the “title” attribute. I’ve got 7,500 images online acquired over a decade . . .)
This is disappointing, because I like SmugMug’s promise of customization, and I have never been afraid to roll my arms up to hack on templates, HTML, and CSS to achieve my desires. Perhaps in the next few years SmugMug will become a little more flexible such that it can easily achieve what I want:
- Individual pages for my photos
- Support for a “title” attribute
- An ability to browse title/descriptions (Flickr “detail” view)
Every so often I have this idea that the WordPress Gallery feature should take some steroids and create a friendly, Flickr-API-compatible hosting environment, which you could then customize just as much as you can customize a self-hosted WordPress blog . . . but that is very far beyond my code abilities and free time.
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No shortage of nickel in my diet today.
The cashier got a chuckle, but I didn’t need the nickel to pay.
The obverse commemorates the Louisiana Purchase.
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