Back in June we adopted a dog, James, from the Humane Society. Although I thought about it, I decided not to post about the costs of owning a dog until his costs broke the $1,000 barrier. I’ve never had a dog before, and I wanted to keep an open mind towards the dog and not sweat it since my wife really wanted one bad as she has had dogs all her life. I’m sure the dog lovers out there understand. But almost three months later, I like the dog a lot, and we seem to have gotten over the large initial expeditures. I’ve been tracking our pet expenses using MS Money, but haven’t actually looked at the breakdown until now.

Here are the initial costs for getting our dog (1st month):
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In our efforts to budget properly, we’ve started to see how much eating out costs when friends and relatives visit, and started to cook a lot more at home when it’s just us. So I’ve been doing a lot of shopping at the grocery store, and trying to use Couponing as much as possible. One major hurdle I’ve come across is deciding at what price something is worth stocking up for.

So thanks to a 1-Click Install by Dreamhost and many hours last night futzing with it, I have created a PricesWiki for groceries. If you aren’t familiar with Wikipedia, it’s an encyclopedia written collaboratively by everyone on the internet. It’s like a big shared chalkboard that anyone can write on and/or erase. Thus, PricesWiki is supposed to be a place where everyone can help decide what a good price for something is. For example, at http://prices.mymoneyblog.com/Butter you can see what a good price for butter might be. Disagree? Change it or add your own opinion. No need to log in, just click on ‘edit’ and go for it. I encourage everyone to check it out and contribute something!
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Everyone always says to make a budget. So why do so many people not do it? …’Cause it’s hard! At least for me it is. A while back I bought Quicken and Microsft Money in the hopes of being a super-organized personal finance software guru. Now? I only fire it up once a month. And mostly because of this blog. (Another reason I can’t sell it.) Here’s my current budgeting process:

1) Buy stuff as much as humanly possible with credit cards.
2) At the end of the month, download all my statements electronically into MS Money.
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My MS Money files went caput with my dead harddrive, but I managed to at least get July’s expenses done. Here are our results in our target areas:

We went under on Dining and way over on Groceries since we BBQ’ed all July 4th weekend when my sister came to visit, and the total includes the purchase of a grill. Our Utilities went under budget as our electric bill was really low this month due to our lack of air conditioning. Overall, we barely scraped under our budget total of $800 for these target areas.

Ok, so we’ve been carefully tracking and categorizing our spending transactions in Microsoft Money 2005 for the last 3 months, and I’ve collated the information into this chart:

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According to their site, “GBI Home Finance Manager is now provided AT NO COST to all customers thanks to our sponsors.”

Free = good.

It looks like GBI Home Finance Manager (previously reviewed) had added an US-specific version. The default currency in now dollars and the date shows Yankee style at mm/dd/yyyy. I think they’re using your IP address to automatically give you the right version, although you can change it of you want. They’ve also lowered the price from about $28/year to $20/year. According to this site, they’ve still got a free trial, although I don’t see a mention of it on the main site.

As a follow-up to my post on gas expenses as part of budgeting, Flexo introduced me to Cheap Gas, which lets you locate visually where the cheapest gas around you is (if you live in a major metropolitan area). I found a decent-priced station somewhat along my work commute, gonna check it out later. Cool!

I’ve taken a break from playing with Money and Quicken for awhile, to see if I can get away with just downloading files once a month, versus inputting every transaction every day (latte, $3… latte, $3…). In the meantime, I’ve been trying out GBI Home Finance Manager (GBIfin), a personal finance manager that is completely online so you can access it from any computer. It’s based on phpfin, an ‘donationware’ program that is freely downloadable but you’ll need to host it yourself and do your own tweaking. GBIfin hosts the program for you, and also provides some enhancements to the original program as well as support. The company seems to be based out of the U.K., but I haven’t had any real issues (the only main differences I can see is the choice of different currencies, and the fact that the dates show as dd/mm/yyyy instead of mm/dd/yyyy.)
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Ok, I’m slowly getting my transactions all categorized, one by one, into personal finance software, but I’m going to take a break and look at what fixed expenses, or bills that I get every single month, and see if there is any fat to cut. Using my last post as a guide:

Phone (Landline) – Used to be about $40/month for local + long distance. Switched to VoIP with SunRocket, and so far it’s been great. Now it’s only $199/yr = $17/month including taxes. Don’t think I can get much cheaper, unless I go without, but I need fax send/receive capability. Even MyFax costs $10/month for online faxing. Realized Savings: $23.40/month.
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Ok, I’m missing something here. I spent a good chunk of this weekend trying to import all my accounts into Microsoft Money 2005. It looks like it uses Yodlee to synchronize accounts online, but more than half of my accounts require me to manually download transactions in “Active Statement” format, from each individual website. Many of these banks sync perfectly fine in Yodlee Oncenter too. Arrrgh.

Then, when I do download the files, the balances are all messed up. For instance, say I download a file containing 1 deposit of $1,000, bringing my balance from $10,000 to $11,000. But Money just shows a balance of $1,000.
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