1. Set a timer. 32 minutes, or 6a.
2. Check paperwork. Bills? Notices? Unopened mail? Sort, pay, and share.
   well, at least I located all of the paper… going to have to take this stack to school. Which reminds me, I need to check on Macworks on the status of my Powerbook. I left it with them over a week ago. Not very pleased with their service. Call: 512-323-6666
   
3. Check email inbox for ’starred’ emails of due bills. Pay and un’star’. Document.
   my car insurance is due. Amount Due: $795.40 Due Date: Dec-25-09. I think I can probably get a better deal but this will have to be added to a project, running list now being:
   • car insurance–cheaper policy
   • hosting map
   • student loans
   • billing date phone calls
   • budgeting with Wesabe
   • edited to add: this one just came to me–I need to get my credit report due to recent fraud. Can’t obtain online due to credit freeze or something, need to take care of that… GOD I HATE ALL OF THIS CRAP I WANT TO LIVE IN A CAVE WITH ANIMAL HIDE CURRENCY.
4. Go through receipts. Email photos of receipts with dollar amounts in heading. Add shared expenses to daytum account.
   This step is losing relevance. We have almost entirely switched over to using our joint account to pay for joint expenses, & I’m just now realizing we need to pay the rent…
   
   
5. Check balances at Chase twice, Citi, Discover, student loans. Make appropriate payments, screen shot often.
   All is well, aside from those pesky loans. Decided to enroll in autopay to prevent the worst (APR raising if payment missed):
   
   Also transferred some $ from a savings account to checking.
   
6. Check calendar for upcoming due dates or milestones.
   From last week: Stiiiill need to do my travel funding proposal. Also: moving to online backup when I do the ‘hosting project’, I need to order new moleskines, and there is the neverending no-deadline list: dentist, spreadsheet budget investigation, order stamps.
   This week is getting close to the end of the line for this project, I need to outline what has to be done for my pending review:
   • site theming: mostly done, but can still benefit from widget proposals
   • site case study: how did this project succeed & fail? For inspiration, see: A day in the sun, Mekanism case studies. I don’t want to do this until I finish my (now 5) projects, so those will have to be done SOON! Please note, as part of the case study I want to apply what I’ve learned here to my other goalstreams…
   • proposal for abstraction of this project into a communicative object: an exhibition, etext, information product, etc. so far I’ve been thinking along the lines of providing: 1) lifestreaming basics resource packet, 2) a package of modded sweetcron & wp themes, 3) simple & straightforward info on beginning ‘goalstreaming’, 4) a super sexy aesthetic.
   • review statement, due no later than this Friday the 27th.
7. With any remaining time, log into Wesabe and/or Mint and tag expenses, work on budgeting, etc.
   mmhmm.

Actual time spent on this post: 46 minutes.

1. Set a timer. 50 minutes. Then I simply must retire!
2. Check paperwork. Bills? Notices? Unopened mail? Sort, pay, and share.
   
   Attempting to pay the power bill. The Internet went down right when I hit “submit”.
   
   Ripped up some more credit increase offers, decided to pass on some ‘trade in your car’ thing from Howdy Honda even though my dad is bugging me to think about buying a new car, also decided to skip on investigating my Chase ‘rewards’ program, though I have enough points to get some shit apparently. The login barrier is too extreme tonight. Those things can be filed away for next week.
3. Check email inbox for ’starred’ emails of due bills. Pay and un’star’. Document.
   I know I have some bills due in my inbox… first: Discover:
   
   Then, iPhone:
   
   Then, student loan: showed some weird balance of $0. Definitely need to embark on that student loan project soon.
4. Go through receipts. Email photos of receipts with dollar amounts in heading. Add shared expenses to daytum account.
   I finally activated my Chase/Wells Fargo situation! Now I can transfer $ into WF from Chase! Now we both add money to our joint account to pay for shared expenses such as rent and groceries. No more need for ‘squaring up’.
   
   
5. Check balances at Chase twice, Citi, Discover, student loans. Make appropriate payments, screen shot often.
   Chase #1 is good. Paid the balance on business card:
   
   Arghh foiled again! Citicards.com/’AccountOnline’ is temporarily unavailable. Discover paid, loans mysterious.
6. Check calendar for upcoming due dates or milestones.
   Stiiiill need to do my travel funding proposal. Also: moving to online backup when I do the ‘hosting project’, I need to order new moleskines, and there is the neverending no-deadline list: dentist, spreadsheet budget investigation, order stamps, and my remaining projects of wrangling loans and making my billing date phone calls.
7. With any remaining time, log into Wesabe and/or Mint and tag expenses, work on budgeting, etc.
   I am pleased to report I hooked up my Wells Fargo account to Wesabe and began tagging expenses. Slooow progress.

Actual time spent on this post: due to terrible Internet connection, about 1 hour and 10 minutes.

This post brought to you by resetting your Mac’s PRAM (next step in attempting to fix the Internet)
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1379?viewlocale=en_US
http://michaelhyatt.com/2007/01/fix-for-wireless-connection-problems-on-macbook-pro.html

1. Set a timer: I’m giving myself 20 minutes today. I want to take a few minutes to split larger projects into small milestones I can deal with one at a time throughout the week. Things like: student loan consolidation/overview/what the hell is going on there, rescheduling bill payments to all be on the same days, widgetization and how will I ever get there, and  perhaps something about budgets… and GO!
2. Check paperwork. Bills? Notices? Unopened mail? Sort, pay, and share.
   
   Ripped up a ‘promotional rate’ check from Chase. Finally got a paper invoice from Wired so I’ll actually pay that with a paper check right now. Checkbook conveniently located under a pile of pens and feathers. My checks still use my Chicago address. Can’t believe I’m using my last stamp on this.

   I have a check I need to deposit… one day. I’ll put it in my wallet. And the last thing I need to do is deal with my travel receipt reimbursements from my trip to Dallas. I will do that during my work hours tomorrow… There are only 5 minutes left! Totally going over today…

3. Check email inbox for ’starred’ emails of due bills. Pay and un’star’. Document. This is a very dangerous step because it involves going to my email, where there are always emergencies and distractions lurking. I decided to change my email workflow and add a label of “pendingfinance” to the …pending finance emails instead of leaving them starred as action items in my box. This separates them from all the other crap I have to deal with and lets me see the pending issues at a glance:
   
   Clearly those weekly financial summaries from Mint aren’t doing much good. It’s because my accounts are out of date and I haven’t had time to see why… So I should really deal with that loan statement but then I’M DONE WITH THIS.
4. Go through receipts. Email photos of receipts with dollar amounts in heading. Add shared expenses to daytum account. We were almost totally caught up but I had to add some netflix and webhosting charges to the total, along with a receipt from the bar the other night. Kel added up what I owe her and we reconciled finally:
   
   We just had the shitty realization that we should have put Kel on my ATT plan so we would have way lower cellphone bills… ughhhhh. Anyway we’re just about ready to start using the joint account to pay for stuff but are waiting til we have some money to contribute. But we are setting up access to transfer money from our individual checking accounts to the joint account. So when the time comes we are ready.
   
5. Check balances at Chase twice, Citi, Discover, student loans. Make appropriate payments, screen shot often. I fucking forgot my Citi password NOOOOOOO. Lose 20 minutes.
6. Check calendar for upcoming due dates or milestones. I still need to deal with applying for travel money. Still. My official to-do list in terms of long-term projects is this:
   • deal w student loans (I need hard numbers and plans of attack and to factor into income).
   • deal with a dentist appointment. Need a cleaning and this all seems very daunting.
   • order stamps
   • travel money
   • deal with budgeting further with wesabe, mint, and old fashioned spread-sheets from friends
   • deal with hosting and backup and move to the cloud. Amazon perhaps.
   • arrange bill payments to all fall on 1 or 2 days of the month. request special treatment at same time.
   • widgetization of this site. why am I avoiding this so much? Oh yeah, budgeting. I just don’t know if it will be worth it until Kel and I figure out our joint account because using software to look at my budget when it’s so skewed every month makes no sense. So I budget $625 or whatever for rent but then pay $1250 for it, I go well over my budget. I suppose it balances out, except in those things we don’t trade off paying. Kel always pays the cable bill. So how do I budget for that? I guess I should just mark how I pay her… SO COMPLICATED. I will spend some time on this later today.
7. With any remaining time, log into Wesabe and/or Mint and tag expenses, work on budgeting, etc. That budget isn’t going to do itself. See previous number in list. This entire post and described activities took a stunning 1.5 hours to write. Yikes.

1. Set a timer: I have 8 MINUTES TO DO THIS.
2. Check paperwork. Bills? Notices? Unopened mail? Sort, pay, and share. Ripped up one ‘use this check to go deeper into debt’ mailer from Chase.
3. Check email inbox for ’starred’ emails of due bills. Pay and un’star’. Document. The only thing I need to address is paying my Wired magazine bill. Not an emergency. Next.
4. Go through receipts. Email photos of receipts with dollar amounts in heading. Add shared expenses to daytum account. I’m actually caught up on this. I’m waiting on Kel to add up what I owe her so we can coordinate deposits into our joint checking account. This step will eventually go away.
5. Check balances at Chase twice, Citi, Discover, student loans. Make appropriate payments, screen shot often. Discover is fine. Citi was fine but I decided to make another $100 payment. I don’t know why. Business Chase is paid off. O god student loans… obviously not getting addressed today. That is a whole big project that deserves it’s own post. But I don’t have any urgent starred emails about them so I think I’m fine for another week.
   
6. Check calendar for upcoming due dates or milestones. This week I have to deal with finding a way to spend my travel funding money this year. I left in the “travel funding” part because I wanted to mention I think I figured out what to spend it on–speaking at UIUC. Now, to make arrangements.
7. With any remaining time, log into Wesabe and/or Mint and tag expenses, work on budgeting, etc. That budget isn’t going to do itself. One minute left. Not going to happen today.

This post will hopefully become some sort of regular occurrence. I have a lot to get done today so today’s theme is GTD. I want this post to be done in 12 minutes. If I can tell myself it will only take 12 minutes each Sunday to have a handle on my finances, maybe I could deal with doing this again. Here goes.

(I use a sweet program called Minuteur to give myself timers to GSD)

I have no bills in my inbox on my desk, so I go through my email inbox for new alerts. Great, a bill to my credit card is due soon. I log into Chase to try to pay that, but can’t remember my password. I get distracted, accidentally log in to the wrong Chase account, but remember I have to pay the rent anyway. Rent is expensive. I take care of that, but don’t tell you how much my rent is… maybe next time, I can’t give it all away at once. Got to keep it interesting for next month when it’s time to pay.

Back to trying to pay that bill. I have 5:36 left. Jesus. But wait–I have to update my daytum to add what Kel owes me… Ok did that.

But now I’ve forgotten my password to Chase  and have to jump through hoops to get a new password.

SO ANNOYING.

My 12 minutes has now passed. I can see 12 minutes a week is not enough time to visualize my financial life…

And guess what? I just reset my password for the wrong Chase ID. Because I have separate IDs for a business credit card and my checking. Because they are unable to combine the accounts into one log in. JESUS. I input the wrong card number.

I finally log in, only to see this:

Jesus.

Going on 15 minutes now. I’ll try to make the rest quick. I’ll input some receipts into my daytum and check on some credit cards to make sure nothing is due and be done with this post. We went grocery shopping yesterday:

So I have to itemize the bill to see what K owes me for paying. Sigh. Basically it adds up to K owing me $89.74. At least that’s done now.

And to everyone who suggested opening a joint account where we both put money–we are definitely going to try to start that. We already had an account but couldn’t get it to work with paying bills online so sort of gave up on the idea, until Saturday when we finally dragged our asses to Wells Fargo to get a hold taken off our account. Hopefully we can use it like a grown-up account now, but with WF who the fuck knows.

I just logged into Citi to check on a credit card, where I’m punched in the stomach with this friendly warning:

Money is just plain freaky.

Anyway, I tried logging in to check on a Discover account, but the site is down. The last thing on my list to check are student loan sites but I don’t even have the will to do that. So why don’t I recap with my weekly checklist, helpfully created by making this post:

1. Set a timer
2. Check paperwork. Bills? Notices? Unopened mail? Sort, pay, and share.
   
3. Check email inbox for ‘starred’ emails of due bills. Pay and un’star’. Document.
   
4. Go through receipts. Email photos of receipts with dollar amounts in heading. Add shared expenses to daytum account.
5. Check balances at Chase twice, Citi, Discover, student loans. Make appropriate payments, screen shot often.
6. Check calendar for upcoming due dates or milestones. This week I have to deal with finding a way to spend my travel funding money this year.
   
7. With any remaining time, log into Wesabe and/or Mint and tag expenses, work on budgeting, etc. That budget isn’t going to do itself.

What do you do when reviewing your financial situation? Do you do it weekly? Daily? Monthly? Do you have a financial hygiene routine? Is mine intrinsically flawed? How can I save time and not dread this moment each week?

(Note: this post took 38 minutes to write.)