Saturday, October 20, 2012

How We Think About Money

If you're reading this, you probably spend at least some time thinking about money.  And not in the "I-wish-I were-rich" or the "I-want-to-buy-a-new-iPhone" thinking kind of way. Folks of our ilk think of money in the way that engineers think about machinery or fuel.  We consider efficiency and design and improvements.  In short, when it comes to Benjamins, we are a special breed of nerd: the kind who enjoy redirecting spending money to investment accounts, and then also enjoy making a spreadsheet about it.

Wednesday, October 10, 2012

Why We.....Have a Housemate

Today starts a new series of posts on the things we do to save and earn money called "Why We...".  I'll write about things we actually do and know, at least a little, about.  So any bad information you see here won't be from sheer speculation -- if we mess up, we'll do it together.  Up first: why we have a housemate.

My wife and I have had housemates since we started dating.  In fact, it turns out that neither of us has had a place of our own in our entire lives: from childhood to now, we've been living with people.  Maybe we don't know what we're missing.  But when we rented, we always rented a room advertised on Craigslist.

Sunday, October 7, 2012

Monthly Snapshot: October 2012

A former boss once told me that I'd never really be done with a project if I didn't know what success looked like.  Suppose that I came up with an idea to improve an internal process within the company: employees don't know how to file their TPS reports.  I might decide to create an instructional guide, and to offer some training sessions.  But I want to make sure the plan is accepted by the employees, so we'd need to think about change management, as well.  I could find all the stakeholders and subject matter experts, identify the root cause of the problem, create an implementation plan and even put that plan into action.  But if I didn't know what success looked like, how could I be sure that the plan worked?  After all that work, what evidence would we have that showed employees filing their TPS reports with the proper cover page?

Personal finance is like that, a lot of the time.