[CS-FSLUG] Confessions of a Dumb Spreadsheet User

[Don Parris]

@ sjm - I tried GnuCash, and it's ok, except for splitting my paycheck
- income & taxes, etc.  I managed to do it successfully once, and then
2 weeks later, it was like having to learn it all over again.  For me,
it was pretty frustrating - I didn't have the patience with it that I
would have liked.  Of course, I'm a little older now, and might try it
again.

@ Tim - When I started this spreadsheet project, the idea was to track
my spending so I could establish a reasonable baseline.  Over the
first 2 years, I managed to improve my tracking - and, of course, my
spending habits.  It's been very helpful, to say the least.  I like to
keep it 'reasonable' and do use it to help me achieve my goals.

Even so, I tend to dread manually entering the receipts, and my
favorite thing here is that I can accomplish more with less effort.  I
only use cash in certain situations, so the ability to simply import
my transactions is really helpful.  Yes, I still have to categorize,
but that helps me to verify the transactions.




On 4/12/11, Tim Young <Tim.Young at lightsys.org> wrote:
> Of course, any time someone talks about how you can put 10 years
> worth of data into any one thing, my thoughts immediately switch over
> to thoughts about "backups"  :)
>
> My wife and I use a database package that we created, that does about
> the same sort of thing.  The end result is that we can better see how
> we have spent our finances instead of giving us strict guidelines on
> how to spend the finances.  When we were first married, we had some
> long discussions about the concept of a "budget."  I was thinking
> that a budget was supposed to guide your spending habits (put
> limitations on spending), while my wife thought it was something that
> let you observe how things are spent and give you a baseline to
> compare things to.  We have the world's most flexible "budget".  As
> missionaries, we do not have a consistent income (the amount changes
> fairly regularly), and we spend about 8-months of the year driving
> from one mission to the next, so our gas expense changes
> dramatically.  So our "budgeting" program allows us to change the
> budget after the fact.  We look to see where our funds were spend, we
> look to see how much came in, and then we change the budget
> accordingly, though the sum of all budget items never exceeds the
> amount that came in that month.  If we go over budget in a category
> one month, we keep a negative amount in that category until we "pay
> it back off" the next month or two.  Originally, I thought this was
> the most insane form of "budgeting", as it threw out the concept of
> being a guideline to follow.  But it does do what it needs to do, in
> that we can see, month-by-month, how we have spent our money and make
> sure we are not over-spending for our income.
>
> All that to say, it is fun to learn new technologies, but it is
> better yet to hear that you have a good budgeting system that works
> for you.  I think we all need to be wise stewards of our finances,
> regardless of the wacky ways, technologies, or methods we use.  And
> it seems like you may even be having some fun while doing it.  :)
>
>      - Tim Young
>
> On 4/11/2011 7:11 PM, Don Parris wrote:
>> Now you all can come along and tell me how you do it back in
>> Cleveland.  Or Machu Picchu or whereever.
>
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>


-- 
D.C. Parris, FMP LEED AP O+M
Minister, Security/FM Coordinator, Free Software Advocate
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