Moving In 14 Months?

How about this for way-advance planning? We recently signed another lease to stay in our current apartment until July 2014. This gives us enough time to decide where to move, and what kind of residence to live in next. Shall it be our own home, a house rental, a condo or town home, or another apartment home? Our ultimate goal is obviously to own a home (mortgage), but we will consider all options in light of life events and our financial situation over the next year.

We love our current apartment (except for the parking situation and questionable billing models), but we realize that the more we settle, the more space we seem to need. By all accounts, all our plans call for a more permanent and larger place somewhere around town. And at our current rent payments, we can definitely afford a mortgage. Especially about home owning, the excitement and anticipation is brewing.

Nutritional Adjustment

The disclaimer is that we are not becoming vegetarians, but we recognize that processed and genetically-modified foods are not good for us. So we are on a sure nutritional adjustment towards whole and natural foods. In this arena, farmers markets and local foods are the talk, along with juicing and raw food diets (still skeptical about these diets). Our goal is to have nutritionally balanced food for healthier lives and fewer illnesses.

So we are starting with juicing, replacing one regular meal with a juiced drink. Breakfast didn't quite work, but lunch has seemed to work well as a replacement. To meet the daily caloric requirements of our busy lives, we beef up breakfast, daytime snacks, and dinner to cover what the juicing does not (obviously). Two weeks in, I haven't felt much difference in energy and mood, perhaps because our juicing is not yet targeted. But I've noticed that I can focus longer on my usual tasks and my skin is rejuvenated. I also have a crazy craving for french fries.

Over the last couple of weeks, we also wanted to know how much this adjustment might cost. So far, $60 worth of fruits and vegetables is estimated to make enough juice that would last us about 2 weeks. The time commitment is less than an hour to make a batch that can last a week (certainly depends on how good your juicer is and how much time is required to prepare the ingredients). I think a $30/week for one hour commitment to juicing will be worth it in the long run.

We'll still do meats and diary but in moderation. We still love chicken, steak, fish, eggs, and milk. If we can find organic or farm-raised varieties, that's what we'll get, even if they might be slightly more expensive. We'll also still do other crazy recipes in our cooking experiments.

Financial Web Application

With the slew of personal financial applications (and more) available today, one may wonder why I would find need to create yet another one. The answer is simple: they all do good number-crunching and are well-designed, but none meets the standard for what I consider a good family- and faith-oriented financial management application. In fact, most have a lot of features, most of which are not used by average people. Most of all, most are paid services: simple financial management should be free. I reviewed most of the ones on the market and set out to write my own, which I call Geldzin (German for "good wealth habits", approximately). I hope the result to be a best practices study of currently available financial management principles.

The application will do the usual financial tracking of accounts, categories, and transactions, etc. It will emphasize budget-based financial management (an example of a budget in the image below) as a lifestyle. People that follow financial advisors like Dave Ramsey might find this application extremely useful when it is complete. Newly married couples will definitely find it useful (as we have).

However, I'd like to take it further and have the application do much more as regards family finances. I want an organic place to track everything that requires money, and to always know what's available for whatever, or to just make future plans and let the application integrate them easily in budgets, savings goals, and forecasting. The vision for this application is to be a financial tool that acts more as an advisor based on the information it knows about your family. For example, having setup a budget and added your debt accounts, the application can tell you how to distribute your next paycheck to cover the financial obligations it knows about.

Further, I want to emphasize charitable giving -- everything from suggestions of good Christian charities and non-profits, to distributing whatever you may have saved for this purpose amongst your choices, to tracking which ones are tax-deductable come tax filing day.  It encourages charitable giving by allowing you to specify a percentage of income to allocate for charity/giving, and a monthly goal. The application can also advise you about planning for emergencies and facilitate saving for them.  The days of keeping a credit card around are over: you need real money set aside for emergencies.

The application also tries to minimize month-to-month fluctuations of living paycheck-to-paycheck by ensuring that you allocate enough funds for the current and the next month. Future versions will also help you save money by crawling the web to find relevant deals, based on your savings goals and transaction information. For example, if the application notices that you shop at King Soopers a lot, it would try to find coupons from that store and suggest them to you, or notify you of sales. Or if you are saving for a guitar, it would be able to tell you about current prices and availability on the web depending on how much you have saved so far.

The application will also feature anonymous comparative studies, indepth reporting, some financial calculators, popular financial blogs/articles, investment tracking and advice, retirement and life insurance planning. But rather than have static information in your account, the goal is to animate it and make it more useful for day-to-day decision making. Managing money should be a personal experience, not an abstract number scheme you must contend with.

The application is specifically designed to be very simple. As such, it will not connect to financial institutions and bill paying services or do a lot of tax accounting. It is meant to be a quick reference about you financial standing based on the activity you do in the application.

Fitness For One Month

For the month of May, we are engrossed in a fitness scheme: to work out every weekday, have one juiced drink for a meal replacement, and get outdoors for physically-demanding activities on weekends. Simple plan, right? Well, not exactly.

Our workout is mostly cardio and endurance, using the Insanity workout videos (BeachBody). For my build, I am in my target weight so the workouts are mostly for maintenance. We've done well for a week thus far.  That is, until I find myself in a familiar hard place: these demanding workouts require increased servings of proteins and carbohydrates, which we did not quite plan for properly. As someone once told me, you cannot workout on salads. A nutrition adjustment is badly needed to make this work.

The meal we chose to juice is breakfast, perhaps not the best idea. As the most important meal of the day, it is now apparent that juicing does not provide the energy needed for the day. Added to the fact that I wake up at 3am and study/work, then do a full course of "Insanity", and then put in a demanding 9-hour day at work, it is no wonder I'm drained by the time I get home in the evening. We probably need to keep a full breakfast and juice some other meal. Or if we keep breakfast, it ought to provide the zing needed to carry through the day. Whenever we get our juicing book back (The Everything Juicing Book), we'll make more elaborate and targeted juices.

The weekends are for outdoor activities. Last weekend, I was out biking for 5 hours on Saturday morning. By the time I returned home, I had a great appreciation for the week-old workout we've been doing. It was exhausting but manageable because of the endurance from the workouts (at least compared with the last time I was on that trail). The upcoming weekends will see us hiking, doing the incline, and some indoor rock climbing.

Along the way, we are keeping track of the tangible benefits: how much weight we lose, how much further we can go physically, how expensive juicing is (or not), and how we can better incorporate the good ideas into our normal lifestyle beyond the life of this project. Especially remaining fit and more healthy nutrition, tailored for our particular lifestyle.