Your Money blog

Category: Grand Experiment

Reader tips: Spreadsheets, coupons and Walmart, oh my!

Despite this week's miss on the savings goal in the auto/transportation category, Grand Experiment's first week of reader submissions is in, and includes some good ideas about how to save and how to track your expenses.

First place goes to Dale Moncman, who's wired an spreadsheet so thoroughly that he already can estimate his income taxes for 2010. I don't know if that's a comforting thought or one that would keep me up at night.

"I'm quite the guru about tracking my finances," he writes, which includes entering every transaction in Excel, like a big over-arching check register.

Second place goes to Julie Poisson, a Dave Ramsey fan who started budgeting in 2008 and wisely left room for "lots of fun things ... hockey for me, bowling and Vegas for DH" (darling husband). She adds that, "the budget keeps my husband and I talking about money in a good way," but I think some of those good feelings come from the fact that Julie's couponing and other aggressive shopping tactics helped her score. She notes a Target shopping trip when "I went with coupons and spent under $5. (And got 100+ in merchandise, but that's another story.)" A story I'd like to here, for sure, so send it along, Julie.

Third place goes to dlurie2001(please send your real name, folks), who has traded down to shopping at Walmart. "With food being one of my major controllable expenses, Walmart saves money," dlurie2001 says. I have to confess there are several things about Walmart's practices, politics and overall vibe that put me off, but not everyone has that luxury or that same response.

Here's what they win:

• Robin Thompson's "Increasing Your Cash Flow: A Practical Financial Guide"
• "The Budget Kit" by Judy Lawrence
• "Money for Life: Budgeting Success and Financial Fitness in Just 12 Weeks" by Steven B. Smith

Dale gets his choice from these three; Julie gets to choose from the remaining two, and dlurie gets the last title. I'll e-mail the winners this week for their selections and addresses.

For this week, I'll be venturing into the uncharted territory of my family's "Misc." spending. Send your ideas and experience on how you keep the odds and ends from sinking your family budget by e-mail or by posting a comment here on the blog.

Category: Grand Experiment

Hitting a pothole on the road to savings

This is the week I start digging around in the auto category of the family budget, looking for the first $100 to squeeze out for the Grand Experiment - cutting $1,000 from our household's monthly spending. It looks like this first one is going to be tough.

As loyal readers of my column (both of 'em!) know, you can get my beloved 1995 Buick Roadmaster Estate Wagon (aka "The Deerslayer") when you pry it from my rust-stained hands. While the Roady has its utility - towing the boat, hauling firewood and just perfectly squeezing in plywood for home projects - it doesn't have to be my daily ride on my lone trek to the office. The truth is that my long-suffering wife, Mrs. Your Money, loathes driving the Roady.

Mrs. Your Money thrills to the feel of a five-speed stick shift in her hand and likens a cruise in the wagon to driving the cushy, lumbering land yachts she (and I) piloted in the 1970s when we first learned to drive. She was in a AMC Ambassador that she hated (go figure) while I still have a soft spot for the '73 Plymouth Gran Fury four-door I shared with my brother, complete with St. Christopher medal that my father conveniently "forgot" to remove.

So, convincing Mrs. Your Money to let me take her more efficient Accord to work is going to take, well, a lot of convincing, even though I think it will cut our monthly gas costs. That means I may need to look elsewhere, which leaves auto repairs and service (including oil changes) and car insurance.

Anybody have tips to share? Should I start changing my own oil? Or do you have some savvy ideas on cutting the car insurance bill? Post a comment here or e-mail me. Then watch Monday to see if I pull off saving our first C-note.

Category: Grand Experiment

Software makes my pulse Quicken

I promised a rant about the Quicken personal finance program and here it is, even though this more accurately is a rant on the sorry state of online banking.

As I mentioned in the first installment of the Grand Experiment columns, I've been downloading the family's banking and credit card transactions into Quicken for years. I've been using the program for so long that my first copy was simply called "Quicken for Windows," no version number.

Early on, I loved it and kept the checking account balanced to the penny. In the years since, Quicken has become a bloated, complex beast that frequently crashed my last computer with its memory demands. The current version was forced on me after Quicken arbitrarily set a cut-off date for supporting its own file format for downloading online bank transactions. It didn't matter that my bank still offered the option or that the program I had paid for had used that format all along. One day, it just stopped working and I had to either pony up about $50 or start typing in each transaction by hand.

The new version, of course, has plenty of bells and whistles and tries to insinuate itself into all aspects of my financial life, such as asking if I want it to manage my investments. What I'd like is a nice, simple program that tracks my banking activity and gives me the ability to sort the results.

That can a tough one because my bank, Comerica, lists some of our debit card purchases by the store address ... "1545 S. Telegraph Road," instead of the name. I'm frequently calling up Google Maps just to find out that the $27.43 my wife charged at some address on Orchard Lake Road was just a simple gasoline purchase.

More frustrating - and insulting - is that Quicken can't directly import my Comerica transactions because of security safeguards. It manages to handle American Express just fine, but to get my Comerica account, I'd need to pay $5 a month to the bank. That's right: I have to pay my bank to get my own account information to go into the program I've purchased. So what exactly is the "technical" issue here, other than "technically" I'm being ripped off?

The lie is put to all of this over at the free Mint.com budgeting site, which also tracks expenses from your online bank and credit card accounts. Mint.com not only manages to grab all my Comerica data all on its own, but also gets the names nice and simple, so that instead of "PUR NST KMART 2101 TELEGRAPH" at Comerica, Mint just lists the purchase as "Kmart."

I don't find the capabilities at Mint.com to be quite robust enough for the kind of tracking I like to do, so I've been resisting making the switch from Quicken. Now I may not have the choice: Quicken just bought Mint.com. I'll be watching to see if Mint makes Quicken better or whether Quicken makes Mint worse.

So what's your opinion on expense-tracking programs or Web sites? How do you track your money? Post a comment here or e-mail me.

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Category: Grand Experiment

Let's learn together in my 'Grand Experiment'

Welcome to the new Your Money blog!

The "Grand Experiment" project kicks off Monday morning with a look at the ins and outs of budgeting.

Sterling Heights financial expert Robin Thompson of Budget Wise Consulting gives me some guidance on tightening up my system for tracking my family's money ... and how to make spending adjustments from week to week, instead of waiting until the end of the month to see just how far in the hole we've gone.

I've been using the Quicken program to download banking and credit card transactions for years, often with less-than-stellar results, and I'd like to hear ideas from readers on how you keep a record of where the money goes.

Anybody out there use Mint.com or one of the freeware/shareware programs? How about math geeks who put it all into a spreadsheet? (I'm looking at you, engineers.) Any diehards still using a ledger or even a legal pad and a pencil?

I just need a program that downloads data, applies categories, renames payees and allows the results to be filtered for printing or exported to a spreadsheet, especially at tax time. (Also, it should rotate my tires, walk the dog, lower my cholesterol and offset my carbon footprint.)

Send me your ideas and experiences, then check back. I'll post my rant on Quicken during the day Monday.