Personal Finance Blog | Money Management Blog | Financial Help

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

NEW FEATURES:

1. Auto-complete payee when entering or editing transactions
When entering or editing the payee of a transaction you will now be prompted with an auto-complete list of payees. Your list will grow as you enter or edit the payee field of your transactions, making transaction entry easier. If an undesired payee name accidentally gets saved in your auto-complete list you can simply down arrow within the drop down list and press the delete key on your keyboard to remove it.

2. Ability to edit payee, date, and number fields of a Split Transaction
It is now possible to edit the payee, date and number fields of a parent transaction that has been split. We have also made a few modifications to the rows within the split window.

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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A few weeks ago an old friend of mine was venting on his blog about the costs of an unexpected auto repair. Having been there before, I read his post with a great amount of empathy.  I am not exactly sure what broke, but it was apparently something that made a lot of noise and was several hundred dollars to fix.  His family was then faced with the dilemma that many of us have been in before – I don’t have the money to fix it. But I can’t get the money if I can’t get to work, and I can’t get to work without a car.  So, out comes the credit card!

He is a professor at a university a short distance from his home.  The university is too far away to walk, however, and they live in a somewhat rural area - so public transportation wasn’t really a viable option for him either.  He did the only thing he could think of at the time – he increased his debt load to cover the cost of the repair by putting it on a credit card.

The first problem with this plan is that he will not be able to pay off the credit card in full this month, and probably not next month either.  With interest charges, his several hundred dollar repair will end up costing significantly more!

The second problem in my opinion is that he views car repairs as an unexpected cost.   Now don’t get me wrong, I am not judging – I used to be the same way.   My car has definitely had more than its share of repairs, and without fail, they were always “unexpected.” And since I never had the cash on hand to cover the costs of the repairs, I would just put them on my credit card because, “Hey, I need a car!”   Unfortunately, those balances add up fast!  And the interest charges are brutal!

In reality, these expenses are not really unexpected – cars break down and need to be maintained.  It’s just another periodic expense that I needed to plan for.  Thankfully, I learned the principles of envelope money management and was able to implement these concepts using the Money Manager.   Sure, it took quite a while to build up a balance in my “car maintenance” envelope, because I didn’t have a lot of wiggle room in my spending plan.  However, even putting in $10 here and $20 there into that envelope helped when it came to things like windshield wiper blades, washer fluid, oil changes, etc.  And most importantly, it has prevented me from putting those purchases onto a credit card that I couldn’t pay off.

Jennifer Streiff, Business Development

When my wife and I were married, neither of us had ever created or used a budget or even balanced a checkbook, for that matter. We were both, as Dave Ramsey says, “Free Spirits.” When I joined Finicity, over three years ago, I was very impressed with and excited about our flagship product, the Money Manager (formerly Mvelopes). So I quickly became the “Nerd” in our marriage, when it came to finances, kind of by default. It is crazy to think about how far we have come in that amount of time. Everyone wants a quick fix, that magic pill that will make all of their problems disappear into the ether. But the truth is, no matter what your problems are, or whatever it is you want to change in your life, it’s NOT going to be resolved immediately or happen overnight. Change takes discipline and continuous effort. I like the way Ramsey puts it—change is a “process” not an “event.”

Don’t get me wrong, we still have a long way to go in building our wealth, but we have made a lot of changes along the way. One of the things I was hoping would change in this process was my wife asking me (more…)

And now for some official business…

We’ve been hard at work developing a comprehensive, curriculum-based coaching program called “Money for Life Coaching.” This is a live, one-on-one coaching program delivered via webinar and phone.

The program is designed to provide sound money management education and demonstrate how to effectively apply Finicity Money Manager to your lifestyle. The Money for Life Coaching program will help you:

· Develop actionable financial goals

· Build the foundation for financial fitness

· Learn the key to successful money management

· Reduce stress related to money

· Rapidly reduce consumer debt

To help us get ready for the official release we’re launching a beta of the coaching program. As part of this beta program, we’re offering a FREE 10 week money management course ($549 value) to the first 25 qualified respondents to our beta offer!

We’ll be selecting from the pool of qualified applicants and are looking for a diverse group of people. If you decide to apply, your demographic information and the reasons why you want to go through the program and how you think the program will benefit you are very important to the selection process.

If you’d like to apply, please go here.

Nick Thomas, COO