The Armchair Politician

In a few weeks, I’ll be starting graduate-level Computer Science courses at Georgia Tech. Tuition will be a few thousand dollars, plus I’m trying to save up to move into campus housing next semester.

None of this, however, sits well with the fact that I like to spend money.

I make enough at my job so that this doesn’t end up being too much of a problem, but I’m not a very good saver. I need goals, or something to motivate me to put money away. Graduate school is probably as good a reason as any, so I’m giving GnuCash another whirl. This isn’t my first time using it, but I’ve kept up for a month now, so with any luck I’ll be able to stick with it.

Basically, GnuCash is your standard accounting program, similar (I assume) to Quicken, Quickbooks, and the other bevy of personal accounting software. Only, GnuCash is available for Linux.

It’s got a ton of useful features. Standard, of course, is double-entry bookkeeping. When you enter an expense, for example, you tell it that the expense comes from some Asset of yours (i.e., a bank account or wallet) or adds to a liability such as a credit card. This way, any expense you make or income you receive is automatically synchronized between the two places. It becomes trivial to then monitor your expenses and income while still keeping accurate records of your financial situation.

More cool things include the ability to automagically track stock and mutual fund prices over the Internet, calculate tax liabilities (although admittedly, I still have to actually set this up…), present charts, graphs, and diagrams for things like expenses and net worth, plan budgets, reconcile your accounts, and so on.

Already I’m noticing places where I can tighten my belt a little, like eating out. At work, I go out for lunch almost daily, which adds up to a few hundred every month. Cutting back on that should significantly increase the amount I can save. I’m also rather prone to impulse purchases — mostly books and games. I don’t think I’ll stop with that, but at least I can monitor how much I’m spending on these types of purchases, and ensure it doesn’t go over a reasonable amount. It’ll also hopefully encourage me to hold off on some borderline impulse buys, if I see I’m hemmorhaging money.

At any rate, by using it I’ve already been saving up a lot more money than I had previously. This, incidentally, saved my ass when I got a notice from the IRS that I’d miscalculated on my taxes. I’ll leave it as an exercise to the reader to figure out in which direction.