[Eric Poulin]

in reply to: Housing expenses #3627

My opinion is: you’re dong what’s best according to the current market situation and according to the math.

However, you need to factor in your risk tolerance.  I know of someone who, at the first opportunity, paid off his mortgage, even though interest rates were low and he could have invested the money in other places.  We’ve seen wild fluctuations in the financial markets over recent months/years and one’s investments could quickly become devalued and mortgage rates can go higher than expected.  Yes, corporate bonds are relatively safe compared with mutual funds and other riskier investments.  However, as the end of this story about this person goes… once they paid off their mortgage (early in life) they had no debt and walked around with a smile on their face whistling :) 

For me, although I know the math is better the way you are doing it, I’m planning to balance my effort between investing and prepaying mortgage, with an emphasis on paying off that mortgage and eliminating all debt for the personal satisfaction and just in case interest rates go crazy, as has happened in the past.

[Eric Poulin]

in reply to: Transferring between accounts #3618

We have an upcoming feature which will allow this operation more easily. 
There will probably be a checkbox on the entry dialog allowing you to make this entry a “transfer” and then it will automatically double entry in the current account and the target account.

A number of people have asked for this feature, so it will be in the next round of updates, probably in the next 2-3 weeks.

[Eric Poulin]

in reply to: Marking actual vs planned (consolidation) #3575

How about this as a solution…:

The edit entry dialog could have an option (checkbox) which would flag an entry as “not paid/pending”.  When this flag is set, we’d set some kind of indicator icon on the entry row (in the calendar) to visually show that the item is not paid.  Then to change this indicator, you can use the edit entry dialog to uncheck the value, or perhaps we can hook up the right mouse click to also do that as a shortcut.  Then, when the checkbox is not checked, the indicator will be removed and it will look like the rest of the entries.

This checkbox would default to unchecked so we don’t force people in to this scheme.

Bank import consolidation would automatically remove the flag when it detects that this particular entries has been paid. 

Regarding some entries on the same day with the same amount – yes that could be tricky.  I’ll have to add some exception cases for this and make the user choose which title is paid and which is not if one is paid and one is not.

[Eric Poulin]

in reply to: Holidays/ Bank Holiday Marking #3592

We’ve considered adding more calendaring features to CalendarBudget, but then we figured competing with Google Calendar is crazy, especially since they already have lots of really great features.  Duplicating some of their functionality feels like overkill. 
There are times when I want to combine my calendars, but, having used CalendarBudget (in its various stages) for more than 8 years, I am not too concerned about combining regular calendaring features with CalendarBudget for the following reasons:

• Regular calendaring has its own set of features and problems to overcome.  I don’t want to dilute the main purpose of CalendarBudget (either through branched features or development effort), which is to help people manage their money
• For the few times I really want to have a reminder in CalendarBudget, you can just create an entry for $0, which serves the same purpose, still allows reminders, and doesn’t affect your numbers in any way

There are a few other smaller reasons not to focus on calendaring, but these above are the main ones.  We never wanted to be a calendaring tool – just saw a HUGE need in managing personal finances and took action.  We adopt the calendaring functions needed to satisfy the budgeting and money management need, but otherwise, at least for the moment, we want to stay focused on the goal.

[Eric Poulin]

in reply to: Mouse Wheel #3584

Firstly, our goal is to make CalendarBudget as easy to use as possible, so I’m really nit-picky about details, especially when it comes to user interface.  I think I’d want to keep the category list budgets and the current dominant month always in synch. 

We’ll still have the problem that when scrolled half way through a month, its possible that 1-2 weeks of the current month are no longer visible – thus the category highlights will be misrepresented somewhat.  However – to a degree we already have this problem when you have more transactions in any given day that can be shown without a mouseover.  In this case, any transactions that fall below the cell bottom border are also not visible. So solutions to this are either

• leave it as is – its not really that bad and its kind of obvious that the month is not completely visible
• put some kind of indicator beside the category in the sidebar indicating that not all entries are currently showing

Any preference?  We considered the second option anyway for the “too many transactions in a day to see everything” scenario.

[Eric Poulin]

in reply to: Marking actual vs planned (consolidation) #3573

This plays into our design discussions about how to track last consolidated dates to calculate when you do a bank import where do we start the import… not from the beginning of the file because… we all change the name of the entries to something meaningful in CalendarBudget – but the bank import has nearly useless titles.  Also, we cannot go simply on the amount of the transaction since sometimes we combine or split bank entries — such as a bank transaction for $100 at a grocery store, which we track as $80 food and $20 household items. 

So… our current thoughts are to use the ending daily balance as a marker.  If the balance at the end of the day (including all transactions whether combined, split or normal) is the same as the end day balance from the bank import, we’ll assume that day is correctly consolidated and not include it.  We’ll do this from the beginning of the bank import file and keep ignoring data until there is a discrepancy.  Once we find a discrepancy, we’ll collect that data and present it to you for proper naming/categorization, etc.

In this scenario – if you’ve been manually consolidating, or if your plan exactly matches actual – the bank import will understand that because the daily balances should match. 

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Now, if you decide not to use bank imports, your suggestion to flag some bills as paid or not may have some merit.  We can always use that right click menu – however, its very uncommon on the web to use right click.  Most people will never know its there to use it.

[Eric Poulin]

in reply to: Mouse Wheel #3582

Now this is a very interesting idea.  I find even myself wishing I could see just 1 more week at times.
There may be some visual complications with the category budgets…. for example, if you scroll down 2-3 weeks, then only half of the “current” month is showing.  I can figure out when to switch the current month  based on how many scroll have occurred, but there are some other concerns too.  The category highlights will not be able to show all category activity for the current month and the results “could be” misleading if you expect to see all of the category highlighted when looking at the budget surplus or shortage for a given category.
Perhaps I’ll need to grey-out somewhat cells that are not in the current month which could overcome some of this concern.

Any other thoughts?

[Eric Poulin]

in reply to: Future Feature List #3544

I’m familiar with the debt snowball method… and even Dave Ramsey admits its not the best way to go about repaying debt – but you’re right in suggesting that the satisfaction of completing a debt repayment is such a great feeling of closure, its a psychological goal that people can really get behind, whereas paying down a huge debt can feel like using a chisel to conquer a mountain, often resulting in lack of focus.

My experience is that the debt snowball works best if you have a relatively large number of small debts.  However, since in the end this method results in you paying more, if you have few large debts, paying off the highest interest is definitely the best way to go.

I agree it would be nice to have both methods, with the debt snowball being a secondary method. 
Thanks for the suggestion.

[Author]

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