Budget Musings

This guest post by the good folks at ForexFraud.

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The forex (foreign exchange) market is the largest and most active market on the face of the earth. With the fast pace of internet technology, this market (once held open to only large banks and businesses) has become available to us average Joes. With that said, the Internet can provide a very useful means for investors to research potential investment opportunities, but it can also expose you to anything from pyramid schemes to a forex scam. Clearly, it can really pay to do your homework before placing your money with an opportunity you find via the Internet to avoid falling victim to the various types of all-too-prevalent Internet based investment fraud.

An initial step you will want to take when presented with a potentially interesting investment opportunity over the Internet involves getting the facts about any company or investment plan you might be considering from an independent source.

Furthermore, do not base your investment decisions solely on what you read on any particular online website, newsletter, e-mail or discussion forum. This is especially important if the information pertains to a stock that is thinly-traded and from an obscure company or to an overseas investment. Read the rest of this entry »

Wesabe, one of the original online personal finance tools has died. We are sorry to see them go. They offered a compelling service and were an inspiration to us, the creators of CalendarBudget in several ways.

We invite any previous or current Wesabe users to try CalendarBudget as a replacement, a fresh and innovative way to manage your finances. CalendarBudget is a growing service and we are confident that anyone who tries it will fall in love with its simple to use and productive interface.

Jessica Ward, freelance writer for NetBanker wrote an article about CalendarBudget updates since we presented at the Finovate 2009 conference. Check out her article here.

Introducing the new Personal Finance blog aggregator – get all your personal finance news in one place:

http://blogs.calendarbudget.com/

If we’re missing an important blog that you follow, let us know and we’ll have it added.

Enjoy!

Check out the following testimonials from CalendarBudget users:

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Simply Amazing

Wow! I’ve just spent an hour setting up my transactions, history, upcoming transactions, notifications, and accounts and I’ve got to say that this app is obviously build by people who actually use it. Thank you for creating Calendar Budget. I discovered it less than 24 hours ago and have already recommended it to friends and family. This is exactly the budgeting tool I’ve been looking for all my life. In fact, I found it because I was looking at my Google calendar and the cashflow I created in Excel and was thinking there must be some way to merge the two and make it work.

The functionality is excellent…Keep up the amazing effort! Have you considered presenting at DemoCamp Toronto?

-City Dan

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If you haven’t checked out Budget Manager, go take a peek. Simple to use, but very powerful in the way it conveys information about your current financial state.

[My wife] is pretty skeptical about most budget software, because she’s not found something that resembles her budgeting technique, and most programs, like MS Money or Quicken, don’t quite represent the way we spend money and pay bills (though both are nice pieces of software in their own ways).

So I showed her Budget Manager, the demo, and she ‘got it’ right away. She likes to see how much will be in the bank on any one day.

- Chris Wheeler, Ontario, Canada

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I’m so thrilled I found your app. It truly is exactly what I would’ve made for myself. I’d been using an Excel workbook with various spreadsheets on steroids from all kinds of formulas I’d written to keep track of my household budget and financial goals. But it became hard to manage those expenditures that pop up in between set payments and still see the forward impact. I’d thought of creating a calendar myself, but the idea of rewriting formulas was exhausting. So thank you thank you thank you!

One other thing that I’m excited about is that finally my husband and I can be on the same page. If he needs to buy unscheduled gas or grab lunch, he can get a snap shot of our account balance and budget without checking with me first. And he can go in online and make the update himself so I’m not pecking him about a receipt. I hate him feeling like a kid on an allowance!

- Venita Davis

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When I was searching for a product to keep track of my finances I was really happy when I found calendar budget. This product has everything I need and every time I contacted support I received a prompt response. Keep up the good work.

-Squash

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When I hit Google for a calendar budget tool and this site came on as the second link, I almost skipped it because of the fact that it might cost me later (I’m an advocate of 100% free tools and web myself). But then when I failed to find that anywhere (whether online or in software form), I came back to CalendarBudget and had a look-see at the demo… And I realized that this was my dream come true. Before this site I had all my budgeting entries in Google Calendar with the amounts manually entered, and I still had to budget manually with something else to know what was going on in my accounts. I dreamed of having features like CB in Google Calendar, and when I saw the demo page I just knew I’d hit the jackpot.

My second realization was that the money I’m going to save by seeing my budget in advance and knowing when I can spend and when I can’t (had a few bounced checks lately because of miscalculations), I’m going to be saving a lot more money than CB will ever cost. I can also see that Eric is extremely interesting in making CB the most powerful and useful tool for the masses (which I am part of) and that is the cherry on the sundae for me.

There is still work to be done on this tool of life, but like a good wine, it will get better with time!

-Lucas

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About a year ago I started searching for a budgeting/financial program that will help me not only save money but forecast expenses. Every tool I found used the “here’s your account balance, put in expenses and income and here is your account balance now” approach. I wanted something hosted so I could have access to even if I didn’t have my computer with me. After searching for a long time I contemplated creating an application in Excel, then contemplated creating one online that would give me a monthly/yearly view of my accounts. I came up on a forum post where someone suggested CalendarBudget. The first time I logged in I knew this was EXACTLY what I had in mind; my search was over.

CalendarBudget lets you schedule payments and see how it affects your overall accounts over a period of time. It lets you assign budgets to categories and instantly get feedback on how it affects your accounts. I love the fact that you can schedule expenses and instantly know what needs to be changed to as to not go over limits. Constant upgrades, feature additions and user feedback helps in keeping the tool flexible to use in many situations. I used this tool multiple times a day and find it invaluable; looking back I’m not sure how I survived before it.

On top of great features, CalendarBudget is written by an awesome developer in terms of communication and bug fixes. I have had multiple times when I had to contact Eric and received a response almost instantly. Quick responses, great communication and Getting Things Done add a lot of value and credibility. I recommend CalendarBudget to all my friends, relatives and strangers.

-AlexB

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It feels like someone read my mind for what I wanted in a budgeting solution

Calendar Budget is precisely the graphical interface that I envisioned for a budget and money management application. It has a wonderful user interface that took very little time to setup and within a week of using it, I already feel that it is one of the rare gems of web applications that I cannot imagine myself without. Thank you so much for this great service!

-Boyens

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Thanks everyone for these testimonials! We love hearing from you about CalendarBudget and continue to aim to make it the best personal finance tool out there!

If you’re deciding to have a stay-cation or even want to find some fun ideas to do during down time on your trip you might like the following:

• Canadian Living – Get Crafty: Five fast, fun (and affordable) March Break crafts
  • I really like educational so I was immediately drawn to and love the ideas under “Crafts and toys for kids: Free, fun and educational“
  • One of the things they mentioned and my kids like to do is make instruments out of anything they can find around the house. One time we performed “Iko-Iko” by Dixie Cups for a local talent show as a family using the kids sticks from their building blocks. It wasn’t perfect, but we all had fun, including the audience.
• Today’s Parent – Crafts & Fun: March Break Headquarters gives a variety of ideas (crafts, indoor/outdoor activities, sleepover survival guide, scavenger hunt, and MUCH more)
  • One of their ideas was Backyard Olympics which was similar to an activity our family came up with during the Olympic games. Our kids are young so we had fun each coming up with our own simple activities to compete in to see who got Gold, Silver, and Bronze for each activity. We competed in sit-ups, hopping, standing on one foot, walking on a balance beam (we had made a while ago from good left over wood from a sturdy shelf we were making), climb a rope … the ideas are endless and the best part is having the kids be creative to come up with the ideas themselves. This was a good way for the kids to understand a little more what the Olympics were. We all enjoyed a treat afterwards.
    
• Ehow.com provides MANY great ideas of projects/experiments that you can do yourself. We tried making Sugar Crystal Candy and are now waiting for the results. Our kids LOVE being little scientists and doing their own experiments.
• Another experiment we’ve started is something our daughter had done in her Kindergarten class and she was very excited to share with our family. We froze different colors of ice cubes (added food coloring to get different colors of water to freeze). We will put 2 different colored ice cubes in one glass of water to melt and see what new color develops. This is a fun activity, very inexpensive, not too time consuming and gives everyone something to look forward to. We froze a lot of each color to allow for more outcomes.
• One thing I want to try is Edible Play Dough. This will satisfy both of my kids desires to help with the cooking/baking and being creative. Plus it occupies their time with something new and imaginative. I think it would be fun and delicious for me too. Of course you have to make sure your children understand that this is special play dough and that you normally can’t eat play dough. Ehow.com looks like they have some good recipes. FamilyCorner.com has a list of 10 edible play dough recipes. I came across another recipe recently for a sugar cookie based edible play dough while looking for a dinner recipe (which got the idea in my head in the first place) and of course now I can’t remember where I saw it.
• I’ve also watched my sister do a fun activity with her kids, when they were small, with cornstarch and water which she called Oobleck. It’s really amazing to try! It’s a solid and a liquid at the same time. I saw my Nephew punch it and it was like hitting a wall. Then he let his hand rest on it and his hand sunk in like quick sand. It was really fun to watch and to play with. They even had a “food fight” with it, which can be a challenge to cleanup then.

Helping you cope with your/child’s energy level:

• Parents.com – 10 Ways to Get Instant Energy. One of thing you will likely face is just trying to keep up with the kids. One of the simplest ideas I saw to build our energy is to laugh which could be quite fun and imaginative to do with the kids. Take turns telling knock knock jokes or reading funny stories. I especially love to hear what jokes the little one’s come out with, which often make little to no sense, but it’s great to hear their imaginations going. This link provides a list of ideas that you can do with your kids to either participate in their activities or they can slow down a little and participate in your activity to give you a breather.
• ADDitudemag.com looks like a great magazine to help with challenges facing parents of children with ADD/learning disabilities. Here are 7 Quick Fixes for ADHD Meltdowns that could help you get past the meltdown and back to your March Break activity at hand (good for home/public meltdowns). I think these could help with any attitudes that children/we decide to have. I don’t have a child with a disability so I would love to hear how affective these “fixes” are.

These activities and helps are good for any day and don’t have to be limited to your Spring Break. I hope you have a fun filled and safe Spring Break that is also good to your budget!! Do you have any other favorite activities or helps for the March/Spring Break?

If you’ve ever wondered how CalendarBudget (or any high-quality web application) is developed, or how we add features to CalendarBudget, this blog post is for you!

CalendarBudget goes through extensive and exhaustive test cycles. Pictured here, our co-founder and quality control person (tester) Robin, is testing CalendarBudget. She uses 5 machines simultaneously which help cover testing on various browsers (IE6, 7, 8, Firefox 3.0, 3.5, 3.6, Safari 4 and Chrome). After I go through a development period, Robin’s exhaustive testing makes sure that CalendarBudget is of the highest quality. Often testing takes longer than the development of the feature — making sure it works everywhere, under many possible circumstances. I sit on the end at the empty chair and fix any problems that Robin finds, with the goal being to make CalendarBudget the highest quality, bullet-proof personal finance system available — and to find and fix any problems that would be a detriment to user-experience.

Still, occasionally, one of our users will find a problem we didn’t catch while testing. When this happens we get an email or forum post about the problem and try to make the fix as soon as possible.

Recently, I removed the 9-account limitation for Premium users, allowing any number of accounts. At the same time I upgraded the version of Dojo we use, which is the Javascript and UI widget library we use for our user interface. The test cycle for these features (currently in week 2 of testing) is the most thorough CalendarBudget has seen yet. These changes will be released to the server over the next few days once we’re sure that any problems are addressed. Many minor tweaks have been made to accommodate this upgrade, and many more small adjustments to the existing interface to improve user experience have been identified and will be updated and released incrementally over the coming weeks.

We continue through cycles like this constantly. As the product get more feature rich, testing takes even longer for each cycle. Unfortunately, since most of CalendarBudget is browser-based user experience on many different browsers, we cannot automate our testing — which makes for a long and exhausting testing cycle. When we are done however, we are confident that you, the user, are getting the best possible product — and that makes us excited about producing the best tool out there.

Once the test cycle is finished, and all the bugs are fixed, I push the updated code to the server (usually at about 3am when usage is low) and do some sanity testing to make sure nothing bad has happened during the update. Then I update the New Features Log and tweet about the change so you’ll be aware of the new features.

The next day, before starting on a new development cycle, I’ll be sure that I gather any new feature requests from the forum, emails or our own ideas and prioritize them (see our feature development list) and then start work from the next item in the list.

There you have it. I love developing this product. I love delivering a valuable service that helps and changes peoples lives for the better. Since we use CalendarBudget ourselves to manage our own finances, we are keenly aware of how the tool is used and often have great ideas of our own to improve things.

If you have ideas regarding how to improve CalendarBudget, additional features to add, or something you really wish CalendarBudget did, let us know on our forum. We’d love to hear from you and almost every request gets added to our development feature list.

This guest post is contributed by Raine Parker, who writes on the topics of online accounting degrees. She welcomes your comments at her email Id: raine.parker6@gmail.com.

Besides saving money, how can you build up enough assets and wealth to take care of yourself and family in the future? Researching different investment opportunities will help you organize your wealth-building plan so that you can get the most profit out of the money you spend now. Below are five key investments and tips that build wealth over the long-term.

• Home and property: For most Americans, buying a home is the most popular way to build wealth and create assets. Paying a mortgage isn’t like paying rent: you’re not just throwing money at the bank so that you have a roof over your head. When you shop around for a property that you plan to resell in a few years, you should look at qualities beyond the house itself: the location, neighborhood, resale prices of the homes on the same street, school district, and other factors that make the home attractive or unattractive. The more updates, maintenance, and renovations you make to the house will also add to your investment’s value.

• 401(k) (RRSP for Canadians): 401(k)s are designed for retirement, not for short-term saving or paying off debt. Ideally, you will always work for an employer who contributes to your 401(k), although the reality is that not all businesses offer these kinds of benefits. There are also ways to pad your 401(k) like depositing your year-end bonus into the account, and adding what you used to pay in social security taxes if you’ve passed the levy rate.

• Non-trendy investments: FORTUNE recommends sticking with non-trendy investments that have proven to be stable even in shaky economic times. Don’t jump on the stock market bandwagon just because a new company has buzz: do your research and invest in stocks that have a solid track record.

• Stocks: Another tip that FORTUNE suggests for building wealth is to “go heavy on stocks.” According to their proposed formula, you should subtract your age from 120 and put that percentage of your budgeted investments in stocks. The logic is that the younger you are and the more time you have to build wealth, the more likely you’re in the position to withstand risks. [Mutual funds, as opposed to individual stocks, are generally the way to go for the average investor]

• Your credit: While not everyone regards credit as something you actively pursue, it does play a role in your investments. Take care while using your credit cards and always make your monthly and, as much as possible, stay out of debt so that you can establish yourself as a responsible candidate for loans and investments.

I had an unexpected experience today.
I went shopping with my husband for a new watch for each of us or at least a new battery for his existing hanging watch which can be quite difficult to replace. We arrived at a well known department store, Walmart, when they were already open for about 2 hours, they were in the middle of their morning motivational meeting in the middle of the store. I feel that’s something that should happen behind closed doors and not in the customers faces. We felt very uncomfortable walking around, right beside them as they were chanting whatever motivational Yahoo! remarks they were saying. I have to admit, I tried hard to block it out.

We had to go ask for someone to help us, since the jewelry area had been abandoned for the meeting.
What I expected to find was some helpful clerks that could answer my questions. We asked about replacing the battery in my husbands watch. The clerk had an answer for us I wasn’t expecting. She couldn’t help us by replacing the battery for us because we could complain/sue that they broke our watch if something went wrong. She couldn’t let us use the machinery (which we’ve done in the past) to replace the battery ourselves and to replace the back of the watch tightly… again afraid we’ll hurt ourselves and complain/sue. They can sell us a watch replacement battery, but we can never get it into the watch — a policy which if every store adopted… would result in permanent dead-watch problem. She did say that Zellers (another local department store) does still make that machinery available for us to replace the battery ourselves, at which my husband suggested directly in front of her that we go there (which we did).

What has happened with the level of customer service? There are still some companies out there that go past what it is expected of them, but apparently they’re a dying breed.

In contrast about 2 years ago my husband purchased a domain name with GoDaddy.com. The next day he received a call from GoDaddy thanking him for his patronage and reviewed his package with him. They pointed out a couple of items he had included in the package that he didn’t need. They canceled those items and refunded the money. They have always been prompt in replying to any concerns we’ve ever had. That has been the best experience of customer service I’ve ever seen. He now refers all internet domain needs to GoDaddy.

Customer service, even if it ends up losing you a few dollars, STILL makes all the difference.

Have you had any really positive or negative customer service stories recently? How did that affect your ongoing relationship with that vendor?

We’ve created 2 new tutorial videos:

1. Budgeting With Categories
2. Reconciling Your Bank Account

I encourage you to take a look at them and see how you can make your budgeting experience more efficient.
To watch the videos, login to your account (or click on the demo account from the home page) and click on the toolbar Help -> Video Tutorials.