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.

How Not To Travel

For our second wedding anniversary, we went to Seattle, WA where she is from. We would spend a wonderful time there meeting her friends and family, and relaxing in downtown Seattle. Getting there, though, was a textbook case of how not to travel. A chronology of events on the outbound leg of the trip:

• Day before: I work a long 21 hours, returning home at three on the morning of travel. The kind of tiredness and brain drain is indescribable, so I plan to nap for an hour but do not hear the alarm at all. We are starting the day an hour late.
• 0500a: we shuffle through the morning, a foggy drive to the airport with poor visibility.
• 0530a: airline informs us we are too late to check in for our 6am flights. The rep, who we think doesn't quite know what she is doing, books us on a 7am flight.
• 0600a: we discover that our camera's battery is completely drained. Out goes the plan to document our trip in pictures. I return the camera and lenses to the car in long-term parking.
• 0700a: during boarding, she is pulled off the flight because her seat actually belongs to someone else. We decide that I should proceed while they try to book her on another flight.
• 1000a: her flight from COS is delayed until 3pm. I am in DEN at this time, trying to figure out how we can get back on the same flight to SEA. No chance, unless we decided to get on a 6pm flight from DEN.
• 0200p: I arrive in SEA and grab our bags. Outside of the security zone, there's nowhere to eat or chill, except for packed coffee shops. My diet all day is fluids (coffee and smoothies), not knowing there is food in our bags.
• I practically walk the entire unsecured zone of the SEA airport looking for a place to charge my phone, eat a good meal, conduct some business, and buy her flowers (the least I could do, right?).
• 0300p: her flight from COS is delayed again until 5pm because of mechanical problems.
• 0500p: she finally takes flight from COS to DEN and then on to SEA, after spending practically all day in the airports.
• 0800p: her parents pick us up from the airport and we settle into the apartment where we'll stay for a week. But there is still a problem: we are so hungry.
• 0930p: we roam downtown Seattle looking for a quick meal. It's soggy and rainy, hardly comfortable for a fancy dinner suitable for such a day. We end up in this bar, and our anniversary meal is chicken wings, fries, burgers, and beer. It's like an awkward 5th date.

That it all happened on our anniversary makes it worse. I would be pissed off too at how it all unfolded, and justifiably so. This was all my fault, a miscalculation and poor management of the day before travel (granted, some of it out of my control). Had it gone as planned, we would have arrived in SEA around 10am and had the evening to celebrate.

From Refund To Owing Taxes

A strange thing happened this year: we had to pay taxes to the IRS and state when we would normally be expecting a tax refund. It is strange because nothing has changed in our employment or personal lives from last year, unless the tax code itself has changed. I even run the numbers several times (using different tax preparation software) and different ways (filing jointly versus separately) to make sure there wasn't a mistake, but no matter how I filed, we still owed. I expected my business to owe some taxes (and it did), but why did we owe on personal income?

We've had to review the exemptions we take on our W-4, and how we pay for our benefits, and I think it might be because we were both taking exemptions. I do not know why this wasn't a problem last year (our first time filing jointly) where we received a sizable refund. The best we could do is have my wife claim only one or two exemptions and allow higher tax withholding as if she were single. That will help next year.

But the best solution, however, will be for her to claim no exemptions and remain at the higher married/single withholding rate. I would claim only the head of household exemption and also do the higher married/single withholding rate. I've learned that this arrangement would ensure a nice tax refund every year.

Wheat-Free for One Month

After the success of our "one car for one month" experiment, we decided to start looking into how and what we eat. Fresh off her diet, my wife suggested we try a month of wheat-free nutrition. The research turned up mostly gluten-free and vegetarian foods, which we have been on since the beginning of this month.

The research also turned up diet ideas based on blood types, with all its controversies. This is worth consideration another month, as I think there is some scientific merit for a hypothesis that you should eat what would be more compatible with your blood (which is where it ultimately all ends up anyway). An interesting topic ...

The goals for this experiment are simple: to see whether wheat-free can reasonably deliver healthier nutrition as claimed, and how life is like on gluten-free/vegetarian diets, especially for us meat-lovers. Depending on how deep we get, how difficult will it be returning to our normal foods and what will we miss most? It's not like we weren't already eating reasonably healthy food, but perhaps there are good habits and recipes we can roll into our lifestyle.