2022 Allocate Time Log
Many years ago my wife and I met with a financial counselor who taught us about budgeting our money. He talked about several different methods, all with the idea of being debt-free. We weren't making a lot of money in those days and living within our means was very important to us. When my wife showed him how little she had allocated for groceries for a family of 4 (at the time), he questioned whether it was enough. My wife was the coupon queen and mostly also bought stuff that was on sale so she actually made the minimal budget go a long way.
He told us about the envelope method where you take your cash and put it in envelopes titled, groceries, gas, and so on. Once the envelope is empty you don't buy that thing anymore. The idea is to allocate money where you want to spend it so that you don't go in debt and so that you don't feel constrained.
I'm a techie, so I setup the envelope method in a spreadsheet. It worked well for us, having categories, planning how we were going to spend our money and then sticking to it. Unfortunately creating a new budget each month was a bit of a process. We also forgot to enter stuff sometimes, because this was back when you didn't have a phone connected to the internet 100% of the time. Ok, it was before smartphones. Yeah, I'm old.
Years later we went to a Financial Peace University class which discussed budgets. This is a Dave Ramsey thing. I really like Dave. Most of the stuff taught in the class really stuck with me.
- Give 10% away (tithe to the church)
- Save $1,000 for a basic emergency fund
- Pay off your debt starting with the smallest debts first (the debt snowball)
- Create a fully funded emergency fund (3 to 6 months of what it costs you to live - we just picked $10,000)
- Save for retirement
They also had us download an app called 'EveryDollar'. This replaced our out-dated spreadsheet. Each month we create a new budget and pre-spend our money.
I liked the app but there were some things that I thought could be done better. So I decided to write my own. I may list what I did and didn't like about it here later but for now I'm wanting to sling some code. My 'app' is web-based. This is a journal of the process.
Wednesday, 07-27-2022 (1 hour)- Created a web page with a sample of what I might want the interface to look like
- Created a "data dictionary" - really I just listed all of the things I wanted to track and added examples to see if it would work
- Created a login page
- Created a way to create a group
- Noted some future enhancements in the program
- Added some default categories and items when a group is made
- Fixed password login problem
- Added sample categories and items
- Displaying some data (Allocate and Target) now in pretty format
- Now displaying all data (Allocate, Spent, Left, Target) in pretty format
- Can insert a transaction (actually you can do multiple transactions, one for each item)
- Can insert comments with a transaction
- Showing transactions after the spot to add a new transaction
- Changed the navigation style and options
- Added a way to remove a transaction (for your group) with feedback
- Trimming all insert data
- Begin to add New Amount form fields so they can change the Allocate and Target amounts
- Working on adding New Amount form fields so they can change the Allocate and Target amounts
Total time: 18 hours
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