Local Insanity

I’ve been away for the last 10 days or so on a well-deserved vacation. Here are a few updates that all have to do with money:

1. The Fed lowered the Prime Rate, and ING Direct lowered their interests rates the next day
2. Helio finally gave me the $272 they owed me (which after 9 months they should owe me $10 interest, but whatever)
3. I now work for wesabe.com, a personal finance website
4. I’m switching to EverBank from ING’s Orange Savings and Wells Fargo’s checking

I’m really excited about the new job, in part because I think it’s a cool company with a good product, but also because I’ll still get to do Rails work with some pretty cool people, like Coda Hale and Andre Arko. Attendio was a good learning experience for me, and I wish them luck in the future, but I think it was time for me to move on and I think I made the right decision.

Number 1 doesn’t bother me so much because of number 4, as EverBank has yet to lower their rates (which stand at 5.01% APY vs. ING’s 4.20% APY for Money Market and 3.65% APY vs. WellsFargo’s 0.00% APY on checking). EverBank also lets you send electronic (or paper) checks, though you can’t write them yourself — you do it online — and you get an ATM card which you can use at BofA, Wells Fargo, and more and they will reimburse you up to $6/mo in fees from other banks, which I estimate to be about two withdraws per month — more than I ever make.

The Helio thing came four days after my last conversation with them (9/17 to 9/21), indicating that perhaps the only way to get your refund back is to be a persistent and bitchy thorn in their side. I’m glad that chapter in my life is closed.

I have a problem. Getting Things Done is a book by David Allen, and I enjoyed it greatly. I would love to put his ideas about stress-free time management into practice but, as I said, I have a problem. The problem is that I am lazy — I can’t be bothered to remember anything. What I’ve found from a practical standpoint is this:

• irrelevant projects and distractions never last very long
• useful projects have to repeatedly break into my consciousness
• it’s easy to temporarily give distractions free reign
• keeping a list of things to do is only useful if I actually look at the list

Of all the reasons my ventures into GTD have failed, the last one is the biggest. The things I’ve been successful at are the ones that required very little motivation from me. A good example is paying my credit card bills. I get reminders a week before they’re due, and I go right then to schedule my payment. I could set this up to happen automatically, and I probably should, but either way it works and I don’t really worry about it.

Make it Automatic

This is the world according to The Automatic Millionaire: set up your system once, and make it automatic. I’ve been looking for a way to apply this to GTD with minimal success. It seems that I must either make my system electronic and pervasive, or make it live on paper and carry it with me at all times. The problem with the former is synchronization. The problem with the latter is notification.

Electronic

For the electronic solution it seems clear that it must live on the web, and that the phone is the only logical place for me to interface with it on the go. I am in the habit of carrying a phone, but I cannot bring myself to carry any other devices — the bulk is just too much. Such a system would have to make it very easy for me to enter new todos, view existing ones relevant to my context, and to set reminders from anywhere.

Paper

The paper system would live with me, carried on my person. It’d most likely be a pen and some index cards (in fact, that’s what it is right now). This system doesn’t work for me because it has no way of notifying me about what’s going on and has no way of reminding me to look at the lists to see what needs to be done when context switching. The only thing I can think to do is to set a periodic alarm that makes me review the lists.

The Solution

I’m not sure what the final answer is, but I may have a preview in the form of my latest revision of my perpetually-under-development personal finance app. For years I tried the track-all-expenses route, complete with tagging. This required far more work than I was willing to put into managing my money. My new approach is based on a series of spiders. They crawl my banking sites and report on how things are going. At the moment it is not automatic: I must start the server, then click Refresh, and then it’ll show me my latest account balances. It’s certainly much easier than logging into each system separately and taking note, adding them up, etc.

But it could be better — it could be automatic. The next feature I’m going to add is that of Goals. I might set up a goal that says I’d like to net $1000 this month, and then my script will automatically let me know how that goal is going. That way, I analyze things only occasionally, then I get feedback as time goes on. The feedback will tell me whether I can eat out, or whether I should pack a lunch.

Is it possible to apply this methodology to GTD? Or am I trying to shove a square peg into a round hole?

Grams and Grandpa Black gave me a book for my birthday called “The Automatic Millionaire” by David Bach. I read the introduction, and so far I’ve been amused at the style of his writing, which is a bit like a traveling medicine proprietor from the early 1900s, and by the obviousness of what he’s saying.

He claims that budgets don’t work. Discipline doesn’t work. Paying bills first and saving some of what’s left doesn’t work. Buying on credit doesn’t work (except in real estate). I agree with him, but the funny thing is that this is not really new to me - my other grandparents (the Donovans) have been telling me and my sister this for years, particularly that last point.

The most important thing about all of this, and the reason why discipline doesn’t matter, is that your finances should be automatic. This is again something the Donovans told me many times. I have a number of automatic financial transactions set up, but not all - some of which are intentional. I’m not sure why, but I thought that having to manually pay my credit card bill every month would give me more control, or at least notice, of my financial situation. It hasn’t. I always pay in full, so that doesn’t vary. It hasn’t made me more aware of my spending, as I’d hoped it would. In all it’s made me more worried about it.

The funny thing is that I could have easily applied the lessons I’ve learned from Agile Programming to my finances, the biggest one being that of automation. In software, you have certain assertions that, given such and such parameters, must be true. There are ways of codifying these assertions into what is usually called a Unit Test. After a while you end up with a suite of tests that, if comprehensive, will tell you how well your software is abiding by its contract. The problem with unit tests is that they atrophy very easily. It’s so easy to forget or intentionally skip the tests when developing. That’s why they need to be automated. When they are automated, you can’t ignore your software’s contract violations because they are in your face. The point is this: automate, or it will never happen.

The same applies to finances, though to a lesser extreme. I do pay my credit card bill even though it’s not automatic because there are serious and immediate consequences to my not doing it.

I’d taken a few steps on my own before I got this book that I think have helped my finances and my sanity:

No, I don’t want a receipt

I tried, unsuccessfully, for a long time to record every financial transaction I ever was involved in. This was detrimental because I spent more time on the overhead of bookkeeping than the money involved was worth. I constantly worried about stacks of unfiled receipts, staring at me on the kitchen table. I wanted to aspire to some level of financial mastery as the banker in Atlas Shrugged, who balanced his huge banking empire down to the penny.

I can’t do that, nor do I really want to anymore. Do I ever really want to find out how much I’ve spent on movie rentals in the last month? Or on eating out this last week with employees from j2? No. Not really. The need has never come up, and I don’t think knowing would benefit my financial situation much.

Quick, what’s the balance?

I wrote a script a while back to get the balance of my Wells Fargo accounts. It worked, but wasn’t that great. I’ve since improved it and added one for my credit card, and both of these show up on my desktop, updated automatically every three hours. This helps me track my finances much better than tediously recording receipts ever could.

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