Taking control of your personal finance

I asked you how do you take care of your finance few days ago because I’m a mess and I have no idea how much I spend in a month. I also asked some friends. Ironically four economists (Ph.D to be) and none of us take care of our $$. Not that we have much to take care of (poor grad student) but at least to have an idea of how much we spend in each category raptly. Shame on us 😦

Yesterday I decided to take control over $$. 👿 How hard can it be? Well… just couple of hours of “research” until I found two very handy programs 😉

The first one is recommended by Gina: Mac iWork Numbers

• Spreadsheets are built on a flexible, free-form canvas. So you can move tables, charts, graphics, and text anywhere you want on the page. As tables resize, objects automatically adjust to fit around them.
• Numbers lets you create categories based on information from any column. It automatically generates a summary row for each category. By using just the summary row, you can collapse, expand, and rearrange categories to organize your data any way you want.

Why I like it:

• It comes with a format for personal finance. You just need to copy paste banking report (summary that you can download from your online banking) into the template and you’ll have a spending summary by category.
• It’s easy to change font/color.
• It’s visually prettier than excel.
• It’s more user friendly than excel.

I’ve created a template. If you need a copy, let me know 🙂

The second one is Pageonce

Pageonce was designed to help you control your finances. With Pageonce you can easily track your bank accounts, credit cards, investment and travel plans, monitor bills and manage your money. Pageonce is available to online or on your mobile, anytime and anywhere you need it.

What’s so good about it?

• It’s FREE, just sign up for an account either online or with your iphone.
• Alerts and notification to pay bills. So, no more late charges.
• You can add all your account: checking account, credit card, mileage programs, utilities, paypal… etc. You don’t need to log-in in multiple accounts and websites to see your transactions, just Page Once 😉
• You can take it everywhere. I just download the iphone app (also free).

I recommend Pageonce for daily use (if you are iphone/blackberry user) and Numbers once a week to keep track of your spending. 🙂

If you’re like me, who never look into bills and don’t keep track of spending, you’d better START NOW. Why? Because things can go out of control, just like what happened to me this month. I got shocked when I realize how much I am spending!!! Some seriously control is needed here.

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Back to eats. Nothing fancy but I did make a new breakfast combo

Baked Apple (Manzana Asada). It’s a classic argentinean dessert. Simple, tasty and comforting.

Ingredients:

• an apple
• 1/2 tbsp butter
• 1 tbsp sugar
• cinnamon

Method:

• Take out the core of the apple
• Put the butter and sugar in the hole
• Bake at 350 F for 30 min
• Add cinnamon.

I made a mess with a cup of greek yogurt.

YUM~

After a week of random and non standard eats (roasted chicken, indian food and pizza), I craved simple food, mainly veggies.

garlic sauteed chinese green bean

cabbage sauteed with dry shrimp

served with oatmeal porridge

A complete leisure day also involved 3 hours nap 😯 (I woke up at 6AM even though I went to bed at 2AM the night before) and magazine reading. I had more things to do like cleaning, laundry, exchanging fall-summer clothes, etc, but I was lazy and tired. I guess after a big battle, we need some good rest. 🙂

Today’s plan: heading to NYC to hear Gotan Project and play with Maggie!!! 😆

Q: What’s your favorite kitchen gadget/appliance?