Tech. Business. Life.

One of my favorite business “journalists” - Stanley Bing - has a great post about how the fall out on Wall Street is really just karma.

You know - I have to agree. We’ve watched businesses rise and fall at the whims of these guys, who cared more about their bottom lines than the success of the businesses. It’s because of them a quarter point of share price is more valuable than 1000 jobs.

I’m currently reading “Supercrunchers” (very cool book, btw) - and it speaks of experts who don’t understand the true nature of their actions, simply because the existence of their paychecks rely on that exact fact. I think that’s a great line.

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So, I’m a personal finance geek. I worship at the altar of Dave Ramsey and Suze Orman. I love it - it’s interesting and fun to plan. Most importantly, it’s one of the most important things you can do for yourself. Managing your money and credit is vital to your future - so the sooner you start, the better.

In the spirit of that, I did a template of my personal finance spreadsheet for a friend, and he thought it was pretty cool, so I thought I’d share it here as well. You can download a blank version here (I’ve added in some “dummy” numbers for reference).

The purpose of this model is to manage your month to month cash flow, taking into account debt amortization and savings (although no interest is applied to the savings, but that would be easy to add in). It’s pretty basic, but it’s what I’ve been using for quite a while now, and I have to say, it really works!

If you like this - please let me know! Also, if you have questions, I’d be happy to answer them. Just leave comments and I’ll reply.

One last thing - if you’d like to add something like savings account interest but can’t, let me know and I’ll work on it. It would be very cool to see this evolve into a more sophisticated tool that we can share for free.

UPDATE - Andy over at the Bofe Blog saw my spreadsheet, and raised me a savings account.  I say, download both!

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“The danger is that housing prices continue to tumble and accelerate, people’s ability to pull out equity will evaporate, and you’ll see a serious downturn in consumption.”

This from Dean Baker - chief economist at the center for economic policy.

My translation: “People no longer have access to money they don’t really have - so they won’t buy a bunch of crap they can’t afford, and put their house up as collateral.  They may actually have to live within their  means - which will destroy the profits of banks and huge corporations”

Or - the economy will keep getting worse, because people will stop doing the stupid things that got us here in the first place.

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