Personal Finance Blog | Money Management Blog | Financial Help

Overspending, in many ways, is what is at the root of most people’s financial problems. Essentially, they spend more money than they have and put the rest on credit. They build up debt until it reaches critical mass and then either cut back out of necessity or, use the equity in their home to pay it off and start the whole cycle again. Talk about mortgaging your future away.

At Finicity, one of the first things we tell people is to start spending within their income and get to “30 days funded” as soon as possible. Having a full month’s worth of income in the bank allows you to schedule all of your bills to be paid automatically and provides you with a cash buffer that prevents you from accumulating further debt. The way you accomplish this is make a commitment to yourself to spend within your envelope balances 100% of the time.

That’s why you need to set up a budget and stick to it. The problem is that “budget” may be a bit of a bad word. It implies things like responsibility and accountability—stuff no one, including myself—really likes to think about. However, having a budget and employing personal fiscal responsibility is the only way to truly achieve your financial goals—like getting out of debt and reducing your financial stress.

Fortunately, Finicity Money Manager makes that a whole lot easier. By using it to plan your expenses before you spend, you can meet all your financial obligations and still have money left over to maintain the lifestyle you’ve become accustomed to. Truthfully, having a budget usually means having more money in your account—not less. And that’s peace of mind that is far more valuable than any safety net an overdraft account will provide.

Nick Lashley, Customer Support

We rolled out new code to all of our users today that contain the following new features and resolved issues.

NEW FEATURES:

1. Bill Pay Account Transfers and Credit Card Payments
The “Account Transfers” and “Credit Card Payments” envelopes can now be selected when marking Bill Pay payments “Show as Pending.” When you select either of these envelopes another combo box is enabled that allows you to select which of your added accounts the payment is being transferred to.

In the Pending Transactions register this will create both ’sides’ of the transaction for online accounts. If the transfer to account chosen is offline then you would only see the online half in pending transactions, and the offline half will already be cleared and in the account register since there will be no downloaded transaction to match it with.

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I was sitting in a meeting last month when someone was giving a presentation on family finances and since I’m the kind of guy who has a hard time concentrating on numbers (they read more like Egyptian hieroglyphs to me) I started to zone out pretty quickly. In fact, if I recall, the presentation lasted about 15 minutes and I probably daydreamed right through it.

Then, towards the end, the presenter said a line that caught my interest: “smart families don’t pay interest—they earn it.” I’m not sure why it struck me, but it did. After all, my finances are in poor condition (remember, I’m the new guy here at Finicity) and I’m always worried about how much interest I’m paying on the various credit cards, department store cards, consumer credit accounts and so forth. However, I’m rarely worried enough to do anything about it because, again, numbers scare me.

But this saying: “smart families don’t pay interest—they earn it” challenged my self-perception. I thought to myself, “hey! I’m smart! I know lots of stuff about lots of things! I have multiple college degrees! How dare you say that I’m not smart because I pay interest!” Then, of course, the reasonable side of me kicked in and I evaluated the statement and came to a startling realization—I pay lots of interest and that is not one of the smarter things I’ve chosen to do in my life.

So, I started thinking about that statement: “smart families don’t pay interest—they earn it” and there started to be a paradigm shift in my head. Instead of ignoring my financial problem (which, let’s face it, I can do with skilled ease these days) I was going to have to attack it. More importantly, I couldn’t face the problem like I had in the past—with haphazard and inconsistent tracking of my expenses. I needed something that would allow me to set up a plan and stick to it. In other words, a real, live, honest-to-goodness, adult budget.

That thought scared me. I started to get bogged down in thoughts like how much time it was going to take and how boring it would be (remember: numbers are not my thing) but then I remembered the saying: “smart families don’t pay interest—they earn it” and I made a decision.

Rather than trying to take control of my finances in one fell swoop, I decided to start small, and for me, that means paying off one credit card. To start, I did a simple run down of my income and my necessary expenditures, looked at how much I had left and decided that I would allocate enough money each month to double my minimum payment on one credit card.

Having set that up, I felt better about my situation. Next month, I’ll get brave and see if I can up the amount I’m paying to the card in order to pay it off faster. In other words, I’m starting out small with my budget, and I’m feeling much more successful managing my finances. You might even go so far as to say I feel a little bit smarter today.

Andrew Parker, Marketing

I’ll admit it. I’m a holiday junkie. The lights, the presents, the veritable cornucopia of feel-good glitter everywhere, stirs in me a powerful need to buy stuff. Couple that with a desire to ensure that my wife and my son have a magical Holiday season and you have a recipe for financial disaster. In fact, the only variable isn’t when the disaster will occur, but how much damage will be done.

You’d think, being a marketer, I’d be hip to all the tips and tricks of the trade, but the truth is, I get suckered into the advertisements and deals that inevitably spring forth this time of year like weeds in my backyard. I’m not prepared for the onslaught, and so I get suckered in, drifting from purchase to purchase in a vain attempt to make this Holiday season better than the last.

The truth is that filling the Holidays with gifts isn’t my problem—it’s the way I approach buying gifts that leads to my inevitable New Year’s budgetary heartburn. See, I’m like most people, I wait until a few weeks before the Holidays, buy what I can in cash and then put the rest on the credit card and say to myself, “well, I’ll just have to cut back the first two months of the year.” The plan never works and I end up stuck with credit card debt I didn’t really need.

My mother, herself a self-proclaimed holiday junkie, has a system for holiday shopping. She takes a certain amount out of each of her paychecks during the year, usually about $50, and then sticks it in her purse and doesn’t touch it for the entire year. While I don’t advocate growing your holiday shopping budget in something as insecure as a purse, Finicity Money Manager works along the same principle. Essentially, if you plan how to use your money BEFORE you spend it, when it comes time to shop, you aren’t filled with buyer’s remorse. Instead you can bask in the feel-good glitter of multiple holiday gifts without the worry of incurring more debt.

While it’s too late for me this year, next year promises to be better. After all, since I’m new to Finicity, I can now take advantage of Money Manager which means more planning and less stress. And, as we all know, that’s a good thing.

Happy Holidays!

Andrew Parker, Marketing