Last night brought freezing weather to Lincoln and the surrounding area. Even better, it froze west and north of here—where our weather comes from. It may not mean much to you, but it means we are near the end of Nasacort and Afrin and DayQuil and all of the rest!
The second week of October means we are well and truly on our way out of 2022, if Putin feels generous and doesn’t start throwing nukes around like a petulant little boy. And a lot of things happen at the first of the year that, frankly, seem to surprise a lot of people.
Gym memberships go way, way up. That’s the easy one, of course. And by February you can go to the gym any time you want. But consider this: Anything worth changing your life for is probably worth starting right away, isn’t it?
I am a big advocate of starting to use a program like Quicken in October. I have been involved in one way or another with computers since the 1970s [!]. And in all of the database work I have ever done, I cannot now remember a single time when I sketched out a database… table here for this kind of data… table there for that kind of data… and got it right the first time. I have always had to burn it down and start over.
Which is why it makes great sense to start now, to get a hold of your finances. Programs like Quicken and the rest offer a great deal of what data analysts call granularity, or the ability to adjust the level of detail in your data. As an example, you could lump drive-through purchases at Wendy’s and Campbell’s Soup purchases at the grocery store under one giant “Food” category. Or, you could break out everything, with a listing for Groceries:Toothpaste and Groceries:Ramen Noodles. Now, I don’t know why anyone would need to report-out how much they spent on Toothpaste, but the point is that it’s possible.
You may think that’s what you intend to do, and decide after a few weeks it’s too demanding, and thus back away a notch or two. Groceries:Personal Hygiene or something similar could hold toothpaste, tooth brushes, floss, mouthwash and more. Are you really concerned that your mouthwash spending may be over some sustainable level? Probably not. More likely, you can throw shaving cream and blades and after shave into a Groceries:Personal Hygiene bucket and be happy.
Years ago, I was quoted in Smart Money magazine in a story about “Quickenauts” and how we keep track of things. Some folks took a pretty lax view of things. Others would buy a box of Jell-O and rush home to see how that affected their Net Worth. By the time the story appeared in print, I was a Microsoft Money user, but Microsoft dumped a lot of really good products some years ago and Money was one of them. I’m back to Quicken again, now. I like the idea of an on-my-machine record of incomes and outgo’s and don’t feel comfortable sharing this on The Cloud, though I don’t know why anyone would be interested, really.
Setting up a program like this and really making it your own is going to take a while. If you start now, you’ll be ready to burn all of the 2022 data when the ball drops and start building a usable database that fills your needs in the year ahead.
