December 2008
16 posts
A balanced portfolio | Culture Making →
Financial gurus often talk about balancing your portfolio. But how balanced is your giving portfolio?
Andy Crouch suggests three ways to diversify your donations:
US-based vs. international organizations
“people like us” vs. “people not like us”
“large cap” vs. “small cap” organizations
Andy’s been writing about finances and giving a lot...
Just enabled comments, using Disqus. If you have any thoughts (on this or any other post), we’d love to hear them!
Update: Took them down for a bit. The comments layout will need some tweaking, and we have a couple of big PearBudget projects on our plate. We’ll re-enable comments in January.
In the meantime, you can always send us a tweet at twitter.com/pearbudget!
“Every time we make a purchase that doesn’t have real meaning for us, we’ve added...”
– The Simple Dollar » The Meaning of It All
How Amazon Wishlists Can Save You From Yourself
Prompted by an e-mail from a very nice (and probably good-looking, just like the rest of you) PearBudget user, Noah, I wrote up some quick thoughts on why Amazon Wishlists — presumably a vehicle for expediting consumption — can actually help you stay on track with your spending.
So I have an Amazon Wishlist. I’m not sure how you use Amazon Wishlists, but I use it as a scrapbook where I...
“budgeting is like a jigsaw puzzle: once you find all the edges and corners, it...”
– Twitter / Zac Smith
We’re messing with the Feedburner setup. Apologies to anyone who gets duplicate or otherwise confusing messages in your feed reader. We’ll get it sorted out soon.
I know I said I’d post the New York Times piece, but in the meantime, I came across this forum thread, and wanted to share it with you. Thanks, mommy2avalynne!
I use Pear Budget (www.pearbudget.com). It has a clean interface, easy to follow instructions, and it is online - so you can access it from any computer. If you are new to budgeting, it is a very useful tool, particularly by...
Seeking Financial Guidance on the Web - Bits Blog... →
A few days ago, we were mentioned (along with a bunch of other online personal finance tools) in the New York Times. I’ll link to the article in a second, but here’s the blurb the put about us on their corresponding blog post.
PearBudget: This simple tool guides you through a budgeting spreadsheet. You can use it free for 30 days and then pay $3 a month (in exchange, it doesn’t show...
Sometime soon, I’m hoping to write a piece on how an Amazon Wishlist can save you from yourself. If any of you readers especially want to hear about that, be sure to bug me.
Just wanted to put this out there.
The Simple Dollar » Eighteen Tips for a Frugal... →
This is a great (and quick) writeup on various things you can do to keep your wedding costs reasonable. I think the biggest way to save is to keep the guest list down. This is probably obvious, but the guest list is a force multiplier. You’ll have some fixed costs, and you’ll have some per-capita costs (meaning: the more guests, the higher the total cost (even if there’s a...
“Make the impossible possible, the possible easy, the easy pleasant and the...”
– Moshe Feldenkrais
1 tag
A cool post from Animalhaus:
Speaking of budgeting: We have really been pinching pennies in anticipation of the holidays. I have been keeping my family budget online at Pear Budget and am in love with that service. The first couple months shocked me! BIG TIME! What I THOUGHT I was spending on the different categories (what I had budgeted as the max amount) vs. what I WAS spending after all the...
Just wanted to say how much we love the people at Wesabe.
Special thanks to Allese, for mentioning us in this piece on how to have a successful no-spend month.
Excited about Shanna (like banana), and her getting started with PearBudget:
I started using PearBudget and really like it so far. What was really great was using it for the first month free to see if I would stick to it. It is something I could easily set up on excel, but I found it worth my few dollars a month not to have to think, just enter and read.
Yay!
Almost there
Just want to say we’re almost ready to transfer the blog over here completely.
PearBudget, tweaked for debt repayment →
A PearBudget user named Mike has created a modified version of the PearBudget spreadsheet. In it, he adjusted the program so that it doesn’t record debt repayment as an expense, but rather as a credit to your net worth.
I haven’t actually looked at his version of it, but I love it when people take the PearBudget spreadsheet and modify it in ways that work for them, and I love it even...