Personal Blog of Mike Bowden

Recently I have gotten into the habit of listening to audio books on the way to work. The commute to the office is roughly around 45 minutes and sometimes can be well over an hour, depending on the traffic we hit. Currently I carpool with a co-worker and good friend Zach Coles.

I’ve had a book written by Dave Ramsey that I’ve really wanted to read for sometime. I spoke with Zach about it and asked if he would mind if we “read” it on the ride in to and from work. He was more than ok with the idea, mainly because he’s an avid reader as well and anything to progress knowledge, points of view and/or common sense is always a plus. So we started to listen to “The Total Money Makeover” written by Dave Ramsey

Now the reason for this article. I’m working on a personal budget for myself and my family. This budget is currently being written/designed/programmed in iWork’s Numbers. I’m a Mac guy and prefer Mac products, plus Numbers trumps Excel and all the rest hands down. Now with this said, Zach is a Linux guy and primarily uses OpenSource products. So once I’ve completed mine, I’ll send it over to him and see if he’s interested in porting it over to OpenOffice which in turn can be used with Excel and all the rest.

I’ll try my best while developing this budget to stick with Dave’s outline of baby steps. I’ll also work on including a few extras in it as well that will help with keeping up with these steps. I’m not exactly sure how long this will take. I planned to start Dave’s method in January, after the holidays. So I’ll most likely have something rough if not finished by that that time. That isn’t to say that Zach will have his version completed by then.

Some of the things that will be included in this will be:

• Sources of Income
  • Add as many sources as you have
  • Frequency of income
  • Tabulation
• Bills
  • List all bills
  • Frequency of bills
  • List bills into primary groups
  • Set budgets for each main group
  • Set budgets on the bill level
  • Tabulation
• Investments
  • List all investments
  • Input APY
  • Tabulation
• Summary
  • Summaries of everything listed above

I only have so many “investment” types. So I’ll try to cover what I can and/or make it as general as possible as to allow for different types of investments. If I’m missing something important or something that would be great to add, please let me know once it’s released and I’ll do my best to get it included. I’ll most likely be adding more than the listed above as I move along. I’ll update this entry if I do so.