You Need A Budget

You Need A Budget

The link

You Need A Budget (main site)
You Need A Budget on the Steam digital store

 

What it is

“You Need a Budget”, often shortened to “YNAB” is a personal budgeting software package. Unlike similar software, YNAB helps you budget your expenses actively: you assign money to spending categories beforehand, instead of recording transactions after the fact.

YNAB 4 is available as standalone software, or on the Steam platform. It costs $60 for an “install all you want for personal use” license.

 

What it means to me

YNAB is the only budgeting software I know which thinks the same way I do. To me, there is only one fundamental question in personal finance:

 “Can I afford this?”

Many financial software packages, as well as online banking analytics, focus on what has happened: You have spent this amount on food over the past week; this is what your vacation has cost you; etc. This is a historical view that helps explain where your money went, and can identify where you’re overspending. It does not help you solve the “can I afford this?” question.

When I started budgeting, I built a spreadsheet to help answer this question (I still have this spreadsheet, in a much expanded form). The process I ended up working out is known as the “envelope method”: you take your money for the coming month and assign every euro for the month to various budget categories (before debit cards became popular, you would withdraw all your cash for the month and literally put it in labelled envelopes). You can spend what’s in the budget, not more. 

A very basic breakdown of budgets might be:

• Food
• Housing (rent or mortgage)
• Other regular bills (insurance, phone, TV, subscriptions)
• Emergency Fund
• Long Term Savings
• Transportation (Gas and/or public transport)
• Fun

Many categories already have a fixed amount (e.g. your mortgage payment), and for many others you can estimate one, maybe with the historical data from your online banking analytics. From then on, every time you want to make a purchase, you check whether you still have the money available. If it isn’t, you don’t buy. There are some technicalities such as working out emergencies and what to do with “left over money”, but this is the gist of it. 

At the end of the exercise, you should know exactly how much money you have now, and what you want to use it for. Some of it could be "spare cash", some of it could be "general long term savings", but all money is accounted for in some way. 

I strongly prefer this approach to backward looking analysis, because it forces you to be active and take responsibility. The central question becomes “should I do this?”, a decision, rather than “what happened?”, an investigation. In setting up your monthly budgets it also forces you to look at your spending habits and recurring bills.

The envelope method has worked really well for me. For everyone who wants to manage their finances and doesn’t want to spend days on setting up a spreadsheet, there’s “You Need A Budget”. It’ll probably pay for itself within the year.

Tajemnicze Domostwo, “Mysterious Mansion”

Tajemnicze Domostwo, “Mysterious Mansion”

The link

Tajemnicze Domostwo on Board Game Geek

Publisher Website (in Polish)

 

What it is

Tajemnicze Domostwo, which roughly translates to “Mysterious Mansion”, is a Polish murder mystery board game (it’s also known as “Mysterium” in English speaking countries). In this cooperative game the ghost of a murdered person and a team of investigators try to solve the murder.

The players try to find the murder weapon, the murder location and the murderer from a set of possibilities, which are dealt on the table in the form of cards with highly detailed artwork. The central game mechanic is that the ghost (one of the players!) sends “dreams” to the investigators, which are also cards with elaborate, often surreal artwork. It’s up to the players to find connections between the dreams each player is dealt and the cards n the table, and thereby find the correct answers. Player discussion is encouraged, but the ghost player has to remain silent.

The game is nominally in Polish, but the only non-decorative text is the rules manual. Luckily, the rules aren’t very complicated: rules in English can be found here on boardgamegeek (you need to make a free account to download). You can probably find copies floating around the internet as well.

 

What it means to me

Please browse the image section of either link: the artwork is gorgeous. The makers of the game have gone all out to find detailed artwork with many aspects that can be used for free association (apparently, they rejected 50-75% of art submissions for “not being detailed enough”). There are so many details you can key off of, and the game is set up on such a way that the ghost’s options are really restricted: the ghost will have to improvise and make strange suggestions.

You receive a card showing a sunny wheat field as a suggestion for the murder weapon. What does this suggest?

• The hedge trimmer, which is used in fields
• The gun, which also has yellow as a dominant color
• The dinner fork, which is food related
• The fireplace poker, whose long, thin shape mirrors the shape of the wheat plants

It’s up to you and your fellow investigators in a giant game of “what is my silent friend thinking”. And that friend might just be thinking “I really need to get rid of this stupid field card and I’ll give that player a better hint later”.

Because the goal of the game is to bridge a communication barrier, Tajemnicze Domostwo is one of the few cooperative board games that isn’t more tempting to play on your own. Many cooperative board games suffer if one player is really good, because there’s a strong temptation to boss the other players around for the sake of game efficiency. That’s really not an option in Tajemnicze Domostwo. The game mechanics also make sure you don’t play similar games often. In fact, repeated sessions become part of your playgroup’s own story: if two cards were associated in the last session, is the ghost hinting at that suggestion? Or are we reading too much into this?

I heartily recommend Tajemnicze Domostwo if you like board games, pretty art, or second-guessing your friends. It’s available via many online stores (do a google search, the name is pretty unique), and apparently there’s talk of an English language re-release as well.

Root Cause Analysis

Root Cause Analysis

The link

Root Cause Analysis 

What it is

“Root Cause Analysis” is a video on how the staff of the Jefferson Memorial investigated the decay of stonework in their building. It’s a two minute video and I don’t want to spoil it for you, so please watch it before you read the “What it means to me” section.

What it means to me

This video makes a single point, and makes it very well: “You’ve seen what happens, but what is the cause?”.

Because the video is so short (a “Quality minute”) it deemphasizes how long the causality chain actually is:

• Light
• Mites
• Spiders
• Birds
• Bird droppings
• Cleaning
• Stonework Decay

The elegant solution of turning the lights on later can only be found at step seven. It’s easy to do a few of these steps, stop at “Birds” and set some kind of ugly scarecrow; it takes commitment to keep on asking. What I find inspiring in this case is that the staff only stopped asking “Why?” when the next answer would have involved genetic engineering.

In office settings, there’s also a pressure to stop investigating, meet your deadline, and “stop bothering the busy people”. Corporate IT infrastructures have their share of power washed sandstone and ugly scarecrows as a result. Let this video serve as an inspiration to “go forth and ask why”.

 

Raspberry Pi

Raspberry Pi

The link

Raspberry Pi

What it is

The Raspberry Pi is a small, dirt cheap mini-computer (starting at $ 35). It’s powered by USB, uses an SD card for storage, and comes with networking and USB ports. Despite its tiny size and cheap price point, the Raspberry Pi can output HD video over HDMI.

The raspberrypi.org website refers to a few ‘official distributors’. I’ve bought mine at RS Online, which ships for free if you order € 50.00 or more. Other (web or physical) stores carry it as well. There are many accessories available from third parties, from cases to LED programming kits, to touchscreens. Adafruit is a good accessories shop and idea blog.

Note that while the Pi does a lot of things, it can’t run Windows.

What it means to me

My fascination for the Raspberry Pi comes from the combination of its two main characteristics: it costs next to nothing, and can do quite a lot. Over the past year, the Raspberry Pi has been my number one daydreaming device: the small size and low price point lends itself very well to “wouldn’t it be cool if …?” scenarios. For starters, if you have any degree of skill in a construction type hobby (woodworking, 3d printing, even sewing) you may find yourself considering custom case options very quickly.

Currently, my own Pi is set up to be a home theater device, streaming media from my NAS. It runs on Kodi a solid, user friendly OS to turn your Pi into a € 50 media center. But one day, I will build a mini boombox out of it. Or a wall-mounted computer in an antique frame. Or I’ll attach it to a monitor to make a really strange laptop.

Many of these possible projects may not be optimal compared to a regular laptop or a good smartphone, but they are more fun. More importantly, if you have a Pi you can try them for the cost of an SD card. It’s a great learning and experimentation device.

If “tinkering with computers”, “learning about hardware”, or “really cheap media center” sounds like your kind of thing, have a look at the Raspberry Pi.
 
Lightning edit: It seems that the Raspberry Pi people have launched a new, more powerful model today. See here for news. Apparently, the new version is powerful enough to run Windows, and still costs $35. Do yourself a favor and buy one!