This last week I’ve been using Wesabe much more aggressively.  Quicken was nice, but Wesabe is simpler and I think it has its merits.  Wesabe has a lot to offer for being so simple.  I can track how much I spend in different categories and also evaluate how those categories are accumulating in total expenditures.  One cool thing about Wesabe is that it allows me to compare my spending with other anonymous users.  I can get tips regarding the different categories and goals (more on goals later) that have been submitted by other users.

Interestingly enough my ‘crap’ tag brought up a report showing that many other people have bought stuff from Amazon.com and labeled it as crap.  not crap as in quality but crap as in ’stuff’.  Unfortunately I’m using the crap tag to designate purchases of items that are of low quality such as dining out at a bad restaurant.  What’s interesting is that I can see that I’ve spent money on items that I don’t want to spend money on again or services that offered low quality so I can be reminded not to go back there again either.

Wesabe can be slow at times due to its architecture, but for the most part the slowness in speed is not overly annoying so I’ll continue using it.  Their website indicates some ‘pro’ features will be coming soon and that has my attention.  It may be worth paying money per month or year if the added for-money features deliver needed functionality that extends the already nice user interface.

The goals functionality I mentioned earlier is neat because there are publicly shown lists of goals but you can also create your own and then associate various tags to associate with the goals.  Because the goals are set by you you can get as granular as you need to.  I find that setting a fewer higher level goals, such as save a million dollars, is all I need to do.  But, being database driven means that the site can handle pretty much any goal you want or need.

Wesabe can also auto-update many bank accounts over the web if you choose to use that route.  It handles file uploads as well for the web sites or credit card companies that don’t share their information openly.  Wesabe is simple, clean and offers various security features that make me really enjoy their product.  I wish them the best of luck and recommend all readers give them a serious look-see for their own use.

Wesabe gets a seven star Shake it! rating!

My wife got a coupon that along with a few other complementary offers allowed her to pick up one Hillshire Farms Entree Salad package. She brought it home and placed it into the fridge. As I opened up the fridge all of my ‘excess money spending’ sirens went off and in a near panic (not really) I asked where such a unit had come from. She had picked up the Chicken & Bacon variety.

Inside of the plastic package were the following items (as best as I can recall):

• 1 Pouch of Light Ranch Salad Dressing
• 1 Pouch of Bacon pieces (bigger than tiny bits, but not whole strips)
• 1 Pouch of Cheddar cheese
• 1 Pouch of Chicken, chopped into roughly 1/4″ pieces
• 1 Pouch of Croutons

I believe suggested retail is $3.99 for the package, but I’m going to guess that this is a very, very, very bad deal for your money. We can buy a jar of high quality, high flavor, name brand salad dressing for $3.99 without a coupon. Enough for many salads. Enough for roughly 12 salads at least I would guess (unless you like salad soup which is really just an excuse to eat salad dressing in my opinion).

I can go to the deli counter and get 4 strips of very tasty, high quality bacon, usually around 1/4 pound, for around $1.75. This would be enough for at least 6 salads (unless your salad is an excuse to eat fried pig bits, in which case maybe half that).

I can get a huge block of excellent Tillamook cheese for $7.99 at the bulk store, Costco. I think this is enough for 30 or more salads (unless you like to add lettuce to your very dairy salad soup).

I can buy a bulk package of roughly 8 individually sealed chicken breasts that I can season for myself as I like (I like ‘em spicy) for $17.50 and it will make many, many salads. Lets assume that I’m only going to cook 2 breasts. Those two breasts would create enough chicken chunks to last me 8 salads at least (unless your salad is just an excuse to eat meat). That’s roughly $3.90 for the chicken meat.

I could buy croutons. I don’t know why I would. I could make them. I don’t know why I would do that either, but lets assume that you’ve watched your fair share of Good Eats episodes and you know how to make your own. You could turn a loaf of French bread from the grocery store into infinitely better croutons at $0.99/loaf. Enough croutons for 30 or more salads (unless of course your salad is just an excuse to eat buttery, salty, garlicky carbohydrates).

So, I could buy 10 packages of these pre-built meal deals for the price I could make tens of salads worth of fixings. This is a “Leave It” deal just for that.

Oh, I forgot to mention one very important thing: these meal packages don’t include the lettuce! You have to provide your own greens bumping the cost of using the meal pack and buying a package of salad to somewhere around $6.00 (assuming a cheap salad blend from the produce section). Sounds like someone’s making some good cash there at the Hillshire Farm!

I just finished playing around with Expensr.com’s demo.  Its nice, pretty quick on a broadband connection and feels a little bit more like an accounting package than the Wesabe project I checked out recently.  The charts use a Flash component called Fusion Charts which should be a pretty flexible library to do nice looking presentations of your money as the site matures.  I didn’t care for the way that I had to edit transactions - there were two or three steps involved and if I had to manage transactions with that level of complexity each time I’d give up - but this is a beta so we’ll give the developers some more time to modify things and get them running smoother and faster.

Adding transactions is a snap as the interface allows you to add transactions straight from the accounts page.  One usability complaint that I have is that to edit the transactions I had to check the transaction and then choose ‘edit’ from a drop down menu.  I know that there is value in hiding excessive UI elements, but editing is a core ability along with deleting the transaction (though any good financial manager isn’t going to be deleting transactions all too often).

I believe that at present, because its a beta, Expensr.com is free - however, down the road I would expect them to charge money for accounts to cover server & development costs (this is the interwebs, of course there’ll be money involved for a site about money).  Of course Google could buy them and merge the tool into Google Finance and it could remain free as well

As with all online tools you’ll want to be careful that security measures are taken and that you don’t compromise your personal financial information.

The final Shake it or Leave it Score is four out of seven stars, but we’ll see how things shape up!

My wife and I had a garage sale this last weekend.  We’ll probably have another one before summer is out if we can make time.  We’re doing a second round of purging.  We picked up Peter Walsh’s book, “It’s All Too Much!,” and its further modified our perspective on our possessions.  My wife had already done a good first round but after reading the book she’s starting a second round.  We have more stuff than is needed and its just adding to the pressures in our daily lives.  One of the points in the book is that when we have too many possessions they distract us from our handling life in a less stressed out fashion as well as slowing us down from achieving what we need to achieve.

Right now we’re spending time focusing on our finances.  We don’t want to focus on them as intensely moving forward but until they’re in order we get to.  This book has helped us understand that we need to get rid of some of the other distractions inside of our home so that we can stay sharp on the things that count.  We want to pour ourselves into our daughters lives, we want to go visit other family that counts.  Next year we’ll be married ten years and we want to take some vacation time to go have a romantic getaway together for our anniversary.  All of those require us to dump the stuff and focus on what counts.

This book gets a seven star “Shake It or Leave It?” rating!