My Debt Blog

My birthday was about two weeks ago and something I have wanted to try out was Quicken 2008. I had looked at this software for a few months and considered buying it near the tax time because of the rebates and such. When my birthday came around, and I don’t want or desire much, I received a copy of Quicken 2008 Deluxe. Installed it, got our primary accounts setup, and wondering where to go from there.

This weekend we went to Borders bookstore and I bought a guide on how to use Quicken. Going through this book I have made a lot of progress in the program now. I have entered all the transactions for May and up to the weekend for June, and am tempted to go back and manually enter stuff for January to April to track things on a YTD basis. What I really like about this program is the ability to easly see cash flow for the month. It has the income and the outgo boxes showing what income to expect and an idea of the bills and such, then it shows what is left over we could save (or use to pay off debt).

There is a budget feature in the program, but with only one month in there I’m not sure how it will calculate things. Plus a budget should not be a template that is going to be the same month to month. We haven’t had much luck with a budget, but things were easier to lay out when I put the bills in a list. This makes things rather clear when the bills come in, how much we have to spend to pay them, and then what is left over. One thing I think that Quicken will help us with is the ability to at least track how much is being spent on clothing and eating out.

Doing some quick math on what my wife will make from her summer job, it will be slightly more than what she currently earns at her current job. The flipside though is it will cost more in gas to get to the new job, so this will have to be tracked to see if there is any increase. If there is an increase it will help us pay debt and save more, as long as we keep things relatively the same as they are today. I’ll see if I can get a pie graph or something with where we are spending our money.

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Recently a federal court has ruled that the US currency discriminates against the blind by through paper money. This ruling will now spur a redesign by the Treasury department. They are considering raised ink or even printing them in different sizes. The real question is why has this now become an issue?

It seems like if there’s something that could be changed, why not make the change if it improves things? Paper money has undergone many changes over time. Counterfeiters have always tried to find the flaws that would allow them to copy a bill and pass it as authentic currency. To make a change to paper money to help the blind could take years before we actually have them in circulation.

The most recent and noticeable changes to our paper bills was offsetting and enlarging the US Presidents head and adding a purple color into the design. Most bills also have the numerical value of the bill printed larger on the lower right corner on the back of the bill. These kinds of things help people with poor or low vision at least have an idea of the value a paper bill has, but currently offers no aid to blind people.

As far as solutions to this issue it’s hard to say what will happen. Paper money should probably stay paper and relatively the same size, so changes in material may be out of the question. Raised ink could be a possibility because Braille could be printed on the edge of a bill. They might have to revisit an old idea and consider printing Roman numerals in raised ink (I for 1, V for 5, X for 10, XX for 20, L for 50, and C for 100) large enough so they know the value of the bill. A lot of blind people currently fold their bills in a unique way to allow them to separate the differences between them.

I could pose the question of how much longer we will have paper money around. Technology is really taking hold and a lot of people are using debit cards instead of cash. There is a difference in spending $100 at a store on a debit card and actually putting down a crisp Benjamin Franklin. You feel more emotion from the transaction when you can feel and see the money leaving your hands. Should someone have them add glue to the ink printed on money so it’s not so easy to spend?

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My wife and I have contemplated over purchasing a LCD HDTV since last year when the prices really started to drop. Being a guy I think TV is one of those things we gravitate towards. This past Christmas it wasn’t realistic to go out and buy one of these things simply because we couldn’t afford it. Our debt actually increased this past Christmas so that is something we plan to avoid this year.

With my bonus from work we paid off a lot of credit card debt. We got our tax return finally and the money went in the bank Friday. I would like to say I started making some payments on our debt that day, but instead we both went to the store to consider buying a TV. Retail stores seem to look down on younger people as though they’re not worth helping. The guy we talked to was very rude and pissed me off to the point we left the store. We went to a different store and found a younger sales guy that was very nice with us. After considering the different models of the particular brand we were after, we made our selection on a nice 40″ LCD TV. The thing wouldn’t fit in the car too, but some bungee cords were able to keep the trunk partly closed and we got it home.

The damage is done but WE OWN IT and that is all that matters. We have some credit cards the remainder of the tax return is going to completely PAY IN FULL. I’m emphasizing these things because HD does not mean for HIGH DEBT. Now the only problem is finding a HD receiver as it seems a lot of people used their tax return to buy a HDTV.

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I have watched this website closely for when they would actually release this tool. If you have time go check out Mint.com if you’re curious about their new free online money management tool. I’ll give my experience thus far and probably provide a follow up in a month to see how it is working for me. My backup plan is to continue to keep my Excel spreadsheets updated of course.

Signed up an account and after logon I was taken to the tab to add Accounts. So far I have 8 of them in there and the tool creates a secure connection and gathers your transactions. Then I went to my Overview tab to view the summary. There is a getting started area that lets you see how you could save money (for products they probably endorse which is how they make money), setup alerts to track bill due dates, or look at spending trends. So far so good.

After all the initial setup, I clicked the Transactions tab which basically lumps all your accounts into one big pool. A lot of my transactions have no category and there is some updating that has to be done to teach it what those transactions are for. You can filter the view based on the account you want to look at though, which helps since I track regular transactions on my checking account. Spending Trends tab shows me a neat pie graph of the amounts and percentage of my available cash is being spent in different categories.

Finally their Ways to Save tab is where they make the money through this tool. It suggested I transfer my balance from my 9.9% APR card to a 13% card with a cash back bonus of $110. I think I’ll just avoid the extra finance charges by not doing this. I probably won’t use this tab but I understand why they have put it in there. Overall I think this tool is neat and we’ll see how it goes for a month.

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I have to pose this question because I was thinking about it. Almost anywhere we go technology has changed things. I almost feel guilty about not having to do some things I used to do.

Online banking seems to be taking hold pretty strong. Very rarely do I ever have to even go into the bank to deposit my paycheck. It is already electronically deposited for me and available to do stuff with right away. When I ordered checks, I only got two boxes because it is getting to the point where checks are not necessary. Electronic draft of the account using the routing and account number is much quicker. The debit card has in a way almost replaced having to use cash, and not resorting to credit. At least I had the advantage of knowing how banking used to be prior to this era.

What is sad is the new Monopoly game coming out with the kid talking about how fast they do things. They’re playing the classic game of Monopoly, the dad lands on a property with a hotel, and instead of handing actual cash over, they just punch numbers in the little machine and swipe a card. Is the kid learning about money or how to swipe the card in the machine? Life is also doing this Visa card version of the game, because Life takes Visa you see.

I remember being a kid and actually saving up money to buy something. Granted $20 is not much money, holding Mr. Jefferson in my hand, buying something I wanted and handing the money over, you do feel the money leaving. Now the kids can have prepaid cards that don’t even look or feel like money. Swipe it through that machine like the adults do and they feel empowered and older. I understand how my Grandma feels about money now because back in her day metal change had a lot more value.

Part of me likes the convenience of paying bills online though. The old method of writing out the check, putting it in the envelope, putting the stamp on there, finding a place to mail it, and waiting a week for it to cash from the account feels so cumbersome to me now. Autopay makes it even worse because you don’t even need to think about paying a bill anymore, it’s just handled for you. I still feel lazy that technology has replaced so much of what I used to do.

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This is more of a skew from finances to something else I deal with. One of my hobbies is video games and I also enjoy doing various things with my computer. When I built my current rig a little over a year ago, I kept my original video card because there was nothing wrong with it. That was an ATI Radeon 9600 256MB 128-bit DDR AGP card that I got for $103.99 shipped back in July 2004. Great investment considering the Geforce256 card I had prior to that cost me $300 and lasted 4 years! I pushed the life of the card (OC’d 459/213!) and all good things must come to an end though.

So here I stand needing a new video card. After debating some factors, primarily cost, along with the amount of power and heat my case can handle, I found something decent. Today I ordered an ATI Radeon X1650 512MB 128-bit GDDR2 AGP for $83.82 shipped. Crazy to think that a card many times more powerful than the one I have is actually $20 cheaper in today’s market. I’m surprised I could even find a nice AGP based card given that PCI Express has now changed the video card market. This will be the last video card upgrade I can do for the motherboard I bought last year because I’ll be forced to go the PCI-e route most likely next year.

The old video card I could continue to use as a simple display adapter for my other machine. It isn’t going to be much use for anything other than that because I think part of it is cooked. When video cards really heat up and don’t have a failsafe to shut them down, they melt.

It seems the latest and greatest games are really pushing the technology now and it is hard to make a safe investment in top of the line stuff. I’m willing to bet this card used to cost a lot of money initially, but now it is a step down into medium grade, it’s more affordable. I’ll stick to upgrading my stuff when I need to and try to make my stuff last as best I can.

System Specs (for those interested)
ASUS A8V, AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ (dual cores @ 2.2ghz), 2GB (2×1GB) PC3200 DDR RAM, Pioneer 16x DVD-R, Sony 52x CD/8x DVD, 120GB Maxtor IDE HD, 160GB WD IDE HD, 250GB WD SATA HD, and finally the ATI Radeon 9600 (dead) replaced by ATI Radeon X1650

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