How do you budget your spending?

Apparently my way of doing it is strange –here’s what I do. I know my annual salary, and I know my paycheck amounts (after taxes), and all of the other relevant income numbers. I also know my recurring expenses — the mortgage, food, utilities, day care, and so on. (I break those into needs and wants as well, but it’s not really important for this post.) For the sake of simplicity, you can assume that I include my savings, Roth IRA contributions, etc, in the tally of recurring ‘expenses’.

When I subtract my recurring expenses from my income, I get my discretionary income. I have it in annual, monthly, weekly, and per-paycheck increments.

How do I budget that part out? Apparently the normal way to do that is to plan how much to spend on this and that, and then try to stick with it. Track expenses in each category meticulously, make sure everything adds up. That’s too much overhead, and I’ll never stick to it. Instead, I say to myself, “Self, you’ve got $200 to spend and you’ve got to make it last a week. If you run out before then, you’re out of luck.” The relevant numbers, then, are how much time I have left in my budget period, and how much money I have to cover it. I trust myself to look at my wallet and, based on those numbers, decide whether I can afford to go out to eat tonight, or order that book or electronic gizmo.

That worked when I spent most of my money in person. However, these days I spend most of my discretionary funds online, via a credit card. I’m not keen to use something like Mint.com (imagine if someone hacked Mint.com — they’d have all of your login information for all of your accounts — a single point of failure), and I don’t think it would let me do what I need to do anyway. One option is to have an amount of cash equal to my weekly budget, and set any aside that I’ve spent online. Then I could take it back out and supplement it from my bank account when my budget rolled over. That’s what I did for a while.

A second option is to keep a little notebook and tally expenses. I think that’s actually a great option, but I don’t like carrying a notebook and pen with me. I would prefer not to carry anything extra.

However, I am always carrying my Android phone. As such, I decided to write a little program for it that tracks my monthly and weekly budgets, and allows me to subtract from them by spending an arbitrary amount. On the weekly and monthly budget reset dates it resets and optionally rolls over any remaining amounts or amounts over-budget (as negative amounts).

So far it doesn’t seem to be a very popular app. It was suggested to me that that was because nobody budgets this way. Is it so strange? How do you budget?

SpendingCash 0.3

I have tracked, using a spreadsheet, my disposable income for at least five years. I used to take out my weekly budget in cash every week, but now I work at home and so most of my spending is online via credit cards. I wanted something that would let me track how much of my budget I had left and tell me how long I had to stretch that money.

My first thought was to produce some sort of thin, credit-card-sized device that would do it, but I realized that would be too time consuming and expensive. Instead, I wrote this simple Android app. After all, I pretty much have my phone with me at all times, so I’d never be far from entering my expenditures.

I hope that there are people out there that have a similar need and are willing to pay $1 to have that need met. The first 24 hours have not been promising, but in the end I have an app that I like, and I guess if people eventually try it and decide they like it as well, it’ll be a little extra spending cash for me.

I made a simple site for the app: SpendingCash

Would this sort of thing interest you? Why or why not? Do you think it’s worth $1?

Improvements include louder bell sounds, automatic volume maximization, smarter handling of the onscreen keyboard and the text input fields. I also improved the icons in the app to meet the Android guidelines.

I fixed an outstanding screen rotation bug, made it so that vibrate mode applies to both the bell and the ringtone, and upgraded to the Android 1.5 (Cupcake) API.

The name is derived from a quote attributed to Zen Master Unmon:

If you walk, just walk, if you sit, just sit, but whatever you do, don’t wobble.

This quote is a tongue-in-cheek admonition to focus on the task at hand. There are plenty of timers for Android already, but this one does something special — it optionally helps to shut out the outside world by silencing the phone’s ringtone and/or turning off all of the network connections.

There are still a few things I want to add to the application, namely, options for sounds marking the beginning and end of the meditation period (currently mandatory), and options for vibrating notifications or no notifications. I’d also like to allow users to select the sounds to be used — currently they are hard-coded. Finally, it would be nice to allow people to save various profiles and timings. Nonetheless, at this point I find the application perfectly useful for its intended purpose.

For now, I’m not putting it on the Android Market. I don’t feel like it’s been tested enough to withstand the brutal onslaught of the Market users, and I am waiting to charge a small fee in order to recover my developer registration. The application will always remain open source, and will always be available for free on the project website. However, the majority of users will neither know how to nor want to download and install the app from there, so I’ll make it available with the aforementioned ‘convenience fee’ from the Market. The ability to charge for apps is not currently available on the market, and one is not allowed to charge later for an app that is initially given away for free. I may post it to other Android application sites.

Please let me know if you try this and find it useful, and submit any feature requests or bug reports on the project Issues page.

These instructions are now probably out of date. Thanks everyone for the discussion and the links. If you’re really interested in this, you should probably check out the android-porting google group / mailing list.

BIG RED FLASHY WARNING

• THIS WILL wipe whatever you have installed on your Eee PC
• THIS IS at a rather experimental stage, so don’t expect everything to function appropriately

Now that you’ve read the warnings, I’ll point out that I’ve posted an installation image below. If you want to roll your own, continue from here.

Instructions

1. READ THE WARNINGS – I won’t be held responsible if you nuke your Eee PC
2. Get the source by following these instructions.
3. Create a local_manifest.xml file in your .repo directory with the following contents:
   
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<manifest>
<project name="platform/vendor/asus/eee_701" \ path="vendor/asus/eee_701"/>
</manifest>

4. Sync – do another repo sync to pull the eee_701 stuff
5. Build – type
   
TARGET_ARCH=x86 TARGET_PRODUCT=eee_701 DISABLE_DEXPREOPT=true make -j8 installer_img

6. Wait … It’ll take a while, particularly webkit
7. Make installer USB stick
   
dd if=out/target/product/eee_701/installer.img of=/dev/<usbstick of your choice>

8. BIOS Settings – Go into the BIOS settings (press F2 on boot) and set the boot device order so that the hard drive comes first. Also under IDE configuration set the internal flash drive to load before any USB drives. ADDED 2008-12-21 – You must also turn off the SD card reader for the installation procedure.
9. Boot – Plug the usb stick into your Eee PC and boot from it. When the BIOS screen comes up, press the ‘Esc’ key to get the boot menu. Select the USB drive. You should be presented with a rudimentary installer menu. Quickly press an arrow and select option 0 (sysloader), then press Enter.
10. Let the install run – When it’s done type “reboot” and hit enter. Once it reboots, wait a few seconds and then the android boot screen will appear. Tada!

Note that wifi and many other things don’t work right now, so I’m trying to figure them out. I’ll post the installation image shortly, and more details here as I find them.

These instructions are mostly based on information found here.

Here’s a screenshot from the awful camera on my android phone:

Android Cupcake on the Eee PC

UPDATE: 2008-12-20 19:12Z

Image for your consumption is here (mirror) (torrent). (Please use the torrent if you can). This is governed by the Apache 2.0 and GNU GPL Licenses. The sources are currently available from Google.

UPDATE: 2009-01-03 22:51Z

For the pedants, and my conscience. (On a related note, hello Slashdot and Gizmodo visitors.)
The software included in this product contains copyrighted software that is licensed under the GPL. A copy of that license is available here (2008-01-04 – Link typo fixed, sorry). You may obtain the complete Corresponding Source code from me for a period of three years after the binary was posted, which will be no earlier than 2011-12-20, by sending a money order or check for $5 to:

Brock M. Tice
PO BOX 17416
Saint Paul, MN 55117

Please write “source for Android EeePC build ” in the memo line of your payment.

This offer is valid to anyone in receipt of this information.

Android cupcake branch running on my devphone. Sort of.

However, I’m finally getting back into the swing of things with work, around the house, etc. I’ve started roasting my own coffee, which is great, and Amanda got me an espresso machine that should be arriving within hours in which to use my freshly-roasted beans.

The thing that has been using up the greatest amount of my “free” time (whatever that means these days) has been hacking on an improved email client for the new “Google Phone”, the G1. The included email client was utter crap, to put it kindly, not even as sophisticated as the client on my little Razr2 v8 flip phone. However, someone forked the open-source email client that came with the device into a project called K-9. The name is derived from that of an old UNIX-y email client called mutt, the idea being that K-9 (canine) is a sort of androidy name for a dog, I guess.

Anyway, the client has been rapidly improving. I haven’t done much — just a few bug fixes here and there, and possibly the addition of some bugs (hope not) — but several people are working on it. It’s already getting rave reviews in the Android market, particularly since people have only the crappy built-in client an an alternative. Heh. I don’t know Java, really, but that hasn’t been stopping me. It’s not that different from Python and C++. Anyway, if you have a G1, check it out. We’re improving performance, fixing bugs, and adding features all of the time.