20% off the paychecks directly to registered retirement account. Use a cashback credit card for everything, pay it off every paycheck, and watch carefully that the balance doesn’t exceed what you can pay off. This is key, never pay card interest. Nice hefty reward from that every year. For things that can’t be charged to the card, annualized payment from a high interest savings account which I replenish every paycheck just enough to ensure all the annual payments can be drawn when the times come, all tracked with a spreadsheet for each bill. Extra goes in there for emergency funds, avoids paying interest when unexpected costs come up.
GnuCash. I’m with Starling Bank. I transfer about £550 to my credit card pot to spend for the month and do my very best not to exceed it. I have an Amex (default) and MasterCard credit cards on which all my day-to-day spending occurs. American Express gives me a balance text every Sunday, but entering purchases in GnuCash makes sure I know what it is roughly.
I got mine as a joke. Grandma gave it to me I repaired it and then made few asignments.
But I used it few times just as curiosity. Lab protocols cant be easily writen on it. With PC you have all these nice tools like ChemSketch, leaving space and drawing by hand is inconvinient.
I’m not sure if this will be unpopular, but if the emperor somehow returned, surely he could somehow go away again like it never happened and we get the thrawn trilogy and katana fleet.
I have an Excel workbook with three worksheets. One worksheet calculates my paydays out over the next few years, and using Excel formulas a table of paydays per month is calculated. I get paid every two weeks, so some months are 3 pay checks and the rest are 2. If you get paid a fixed amount per month it's easier.
The next sheet has tables for annual, monthly, and weekly expenses. The annual table has a column for month of the year. If I have a quarterly payment, I add it to the annual table four times, each with the correct month.
The final worksheet is a basic revenue less expenses table, one for each calendar year. It lists my income per month for each month, and then lists my monthly expenses, my annual expenses that hit that month, and weekly expenses calculated to reflect the partial weeks. All using formulas do it is easy to extend out to future years.
The worksheet also calculated how much I have left over, and what my savings target is (80% of unbudgeted funds). It's important for the actual costs of each month to be accurate, because averages hide real world things, like in November I have a large amount of renewals including my annual car insurance payment. I will always spend more than I make in November, and knowing that means I'm not panicking with unexpected expenses.
What I've found is that there is an art to budgeting. For example, I budget $100/month for discretionary purchases, plus $20/week to take my kids out for cocoa. You want to be specific enough in the budget that you have fairly few purchases not directly accounted for, with a little bit of latitude that it doesn't become a grind to track purchases.
Over the course of the month any purchase that exceeds the budgeted amount or that doesn't fit a budget category gets tracked on a separate sheet so I can see if I need to rebudget or if there was just a one time thing. Generally speaking, if it is too much work to track your individual purchases, you might be making too many small or impulse purchases that add up.
I also use Excel for my shopping lists to stay focused when I go to the store, and the mobile app easily lets me strike through items as I get them.
My mum owns an old Olivetti that seems to be a collectors item nowadays. Our mutual favourite (and only) use for it is to notify each other when we stumble across one for sale and how much it goes for. They seem to be in the area of €80-150 so not quite the family heirloom.
Edit; Oh wow. Haven’t checked prices for few years. Seems they are selling tenfold now.
I have a Rheinmetall one from around the 30s that only half-works. It spends most of its days in the attic and only gets brought out to show people once in a while. I used it as a prop for a short film once, so I guess that was my favorite use for it.
Yeah attracting (active) users is the real challenge…
I created !vans and hoped that I could cultivate some active posters before I ran out of my years worth of content from r/vans on reddit, but that didn’t happen…
I haven’t given up on it (definitely took a hiatus tho…) and need to post some new material, but it’s not easy to cultivate active communities. Especially when all of life’s bullshit gets in the way.
But I remember early communities on reddit where I was one of like 5 active posters for a long time, then users would eventually overwhelm the community. r/MisleadingThumbnails is an example.
I think the way to go right now is to create or post in broader, more top-level kind of communities. Lemmy doesn’t really have a lot of traffic, and what would probably be a small or medium community over on Reddit is a niche community over here.
To avoid that, find or make something like /c/shoes then post your Vans content there. You may find a larger audience more quickly, and can break out in to smaller subcommunities when there’s enough content submitters to justify it
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