Ever since the second semester of freshman year at Penn, when I was rooming with the Rascob, I’ve laughed my arse off at this song. It really is funny. It was even better seeing it live too — and man we were HAMMERED (ok, side tangent from original post for a second) at that concert. “Handle” of Dr. Jimmy Bean, 30pk of Busch, and some other recreational substances make for a good weekend. Sigh, mispent youth and all. No wonder I got fat that year.
Anyways.. there is a lyric in there that is “give me back my money, you bitch” or something like that. So, I’ve always had a wee bit of a problem managing money. I can spend like you wouldn’t believe. Yes, I do have some very nice furniture, guns, computers, Harley (that wasn’t a impulse buy…), kitchen stuffs, etc from my shopping trips — but most of the issue is the amount of cash I can blow through. You’d think I have a serious drug problem, where in fact I have only a small one. Err, had. I do make a pretty good chunk from my job but I never seem to be able to save much, and always seem to be scraping by that last week of every month. As one of my housemates put it “You can program the Linux kernel, run clusters, and get through school but can’t balance a checkbook???”. I always imagine him saying that with the Genie from Aladdin – ” Phenomenal cosmic powers! Itty bitty living space.” Yeah. Good times. BTW — Thanks mdog for the fun times, too bad you couldn’t make it to Spain for the conference — as much your work as mine!
SO! I’ve taken the initiative (once again..) to use a computer program to manage my moola. I’ve made past attempts with M$ Money and GnuCash to keep track of expenses, loans, retirement accounts, etc. I started with the best intentions each time, but only to fade out of sync after a few months. I think this was due to how badly lacking each of those programs was in ease-of-use. To tackle this problem again, I have installed Quicken Deluxe 2006 and…well to make a very long story a little shorter – it rocks. I am able to download my credit card, retirement and checking information with one click — right over the web (This Internet thing is SO going to be cool once it takes off). There are fantastic tools for visualizing your balances over time, including a completely amazing (for me!) transaction scheduler. The TS allows you to put in all of your deposits and bills, giving you a graph of the daily balance. The retirement account (Investment Center) interface is fantastic. It collates all of the monthly purchase for each security and shows the loss/gain and %return for each one — so you can see where your return is coming from. There are also built in interfaces to hit Yahoo! for charts and research — not to mention comparing performance against the big market indexes.
The big new feature for me is the budget planner. I have NEVER made a budget before, and let me tell you — it is a painful process. One of my fatal flaws is the complete hatred at being restrained — personally, physically or mentally. Want to get me mad? Just prevent me from doing something with out talking to me about it. Very unpleasent, as I can be quite mean. So, restraining myself in the forms of spending when there is still 100s of dollars in the account is just hard, we are talking a completely foreign idea here folks! I started with what I usually spend per month on things and then with some fantastic help I started to prune down the discretionary items. It turns out that a few things are obvious — I have a metric ass-barn load of “mandatory” bills – Harley, student loans, utilities, rent, insurances, gym membership, pet food, etc – that I had no idea took up that much of my salary. I honestly had more bills than I realized. At the end of the day — I’ve pruned out spending totaling 25% (!!) of my net salary. Holy Shit. If I can (and I really realll really want to) stick to this budget, I will be able to pay off all of my credit cards by July and start to save for things that I want — like a surround sound stereo and leather coffee table. I might even pay off some other bills a bit early too!
So — cheers to Quicken, I guess that is my personal N.Y resolution, besides shagging more.
) It was put to me as a “shift of resources” – I will take that at face value and not ponder why it was me specifically. It was a pretty pleasant conversation — save for that bit about me not getting paid to do stuff any more — and I am not harboring any ill will towards the company….yet 
I reserve the right to be bitter at some future date.
