I have blogged before about the awesome personal budgeting software You Need A Budget!, a/k/a YNAB.  It is now in version 4 and better than ever, with cloud syncing among all your devices (computer, smartphone, iPad or tablet, etc.).  We use it for all of our budgeting, and we absolutely love it. Anyway, if you [...]

Thanks to a post by Tim Challies, Sarah and I decided to download and try a trial of a software product called You Need a Budget, or YNAB. We are now in love with this product. The premise of YNAB is simple: (1) everyone needs to budget, and (2) no other software products out there [...]

A few days ago I lamented (here and here) the difficulty of doing certain at-a-glance budgeting in Quicken.  I think I have found many of the features I was missing through the excellent free service Mint.com. The main thing I have been missing is at-a-glance budgeting.  That is, I’d really like to be able to [...]

We upgraded last night to Quicken Premier 2009, which partially resolves the Quicken 2007 issues surrounding budgets, which I mentioned in my last post, through the Savings Plan feature. Unfortunately, this feature has its own limitations – you have to define a plan each month, cannot define plans for past months, can only define a [...]

Does anyone know how to get Quicken to budget properly for a loan account? That is, if you actually set up an amortized loan, how do you get Quicken to budget for the interest and principal as a single payment? I’m using Quicken Premier 2007, and it seems like there is no way to track [...]

A number of people have asked me lately what I’m reading on economics and the financial markets right now.  Truth is, I’m always reading such things, and no short list can even come close to covering the variety of material I try to read, from the scholarly and serious (e.g., Posner, Becker, Mankiw, etc.) to [...]

When the Bank of England does anything for the first time – it’s 315 years old this year, after all – it’s worth noting.

I am glad to live in Texas, and glad I do not live in New York.

My favorite new (but not new favorite) blog is Evil Speculator (tagline, “bent on market domination, one nefarious trade at a time”). It posted a fantastic and disturbing chart from Gold-Eagle. The chart is one of the best demonstrations I’ve seen of a concept called the “slope of hope.” The idea is that (in significant [...]

That’s what the Fed is pledging to “rescue the financial system,” according to Bloomberg.com. That’s 50% of 2007 GDP, or 288% of 2007 federal tax revenues. Makes my prior post sound look like a praise of good budgeting.