Ok, it’s only been a couple days since I said I was going to give Mint.com a two-week trial, but things are already looking a bit bleak in terms of Mint.com being my primary personal finance tool. Here are a few of the issues:

1. Budgeting feels like an afterthought

Budgeting and planning are pretty important parts of personal finance, but they feel like an afterthought in Mint.com. From what I understand, it launched without them, and then they were added later. It shows. Budgeting should probably have its own tab, but it’s just a box on the overview tab. Adding budget line items feels clunky and the list isn’t organized in any meaningful fashion that I can discern, so it’s hard to check a specific category without scanning all of them.

2. No way to enter manual transactions

Here’s another reason that budgeting isn’t terribly useful: transactions lag several days before they show up in Mint.com. This isn’t their fault, it’s just how the financial institutions work. But if I could enter a manual transaction and then clear it when it posts from my bank, I could keep my budget up-to-date. If Mint.com doesn’t know that I just dropped $300 on a new iPhone, it might think that I still have plenty of money left in my spending category, when it’s actually over budget.

Plus, I do occasionally spend cash and it would be nice to enter manual transactions for that. You can split ATM transactions into different categories, so perhaps that accomplishes the same thing for most people.

3. No way to enter manual assets or liabilities

I like tracking my net worth, and I currently enter all the numbers once a month into networthiq.com, but it would be great if the tool I use to track personal finances could tell me this. And Mint.com does have this feature, but the problem is that you can’t add manual assets or liabilities. This is a bit of a problem if some of your assets or liabilities are in institutions not connected to Mint, or if you’ve got real estate. Ironically, you can add mortgages, but not the underlying real asset that the mortgages are written against, so your net worth will be ridiculously skewed to the negative if you do this.

4. No custom categories

Mint lets you create budget tracking items and categorize your spending, but the categories are all pre-defined and there doesn’t seem to be any way to create your own categories. This is really annoying, because you spend a bunch of time hunting for the best category, and often end up using one that doesn’t fit super well. I’m guessing that one of the reasons they do this is that having every user on the same category taxonomy makes it much easier to automatically tag transactions based on how other users have tagged them. Still, it would be nice to have the option, even if you do give up some benefit.

5. No way to anticipate future spending

This is similar to #2, in that it prevents your budget from being a true picture of what you have available to spend. One of the best things about the envelope method of budgeting is that it allows you to allocate income for *future* expenditures that you anticipate. This is really handy, because if you have $15k in your checking account, it might be because you have a lot of free cash to spend, or it might be because your rent is $1500 and your taxes due are $13k and you’re paying them in two weeks, in which case you’ve only got $500 to spend. To be fair, this one isn’t completely Mint’s fault, as a lot of personal finance and budgeting tools work like this. However, it would be awesome if Mint could find some way to work it in.

6. No way to transfer money between budget categories

If you’re spending way too much in one category, and a lot less in another, it would be nice to adjust your budget temporarily for the month by transferring money from one budget category to another. You can do this with Mvelopes, but the only way to accomplish the same thing with Mint is to edit your budget and then remember to change it back at the end of the month.

So it’s looking like I’ll have to stick with Mvelopes for now, though I plan on checking Mint.com on a regular basis for its analysis tools. Perhaps they’ll get their act together on some of the points above, but for now, it’s just not that useful to me. Too bad, because the design and UI are one of the best I’ve ever seen on a web app.

If anyone from Mvelopes ever reads this, please listen to me: your model is awesome and your features are amazing. But your platform sucks. Ditch the flash, cut your price down, and you’ll have a customer for life.

Since we’re in full election season, I’ve been having “discussions” about politics with friends, family, and pretty much anyone else that is willing to talk about it. I’m passionate about politics, and I love a well-reasoned discussion on a topic that is controversial, such as religion, politics, or ideally, both. My political views do not align with either of the two main political parties, and this apparently is hard for some people to grasp. Anyway, I thought I’d give some pointers on my favorite tactics that I’ve seen used to defend a position without resorting to logic, reason, or examining the evidence.

1. The driveby: a classic favorite
The driveby is actually a way to avoid a discussion and still score a point. It works like this: you just pick your opponent, hurl an insult or accusation, then continue on your merry way. Whatever you do, ignore any response by the other side, because it might be well-researched, well-reasoned, or both. If your insult was appropriately subjective and misleading, the point can’t be easily disproven, so the damage is done. Even if it is disproven later, you’ll be long gone, so who cares?

2. The shotgun approach: spray insults and accusations indiscriminately
If you don’t have logic, reason, or evidence on your side, just try and drown the other side in a mass attack. Throw every accusation and insult you can think of into the mix, and don’t stop for air. The great thing about this tactic is that you can combine several of the others on this page, such as appeals to emotion, red herrings, and false dichotomies. Oh, and a great way to deliver such an attack is in a huge block of text bereft of paragraph breaks. Let’s see how your logic handles this, suckers!

3. Introduce a false dichotomy
Repeat after me: if you’re not with us, you’re against us. Some people like to try and tell you that both sides have good arguments and bad arguments, and we should work on compromise and come together. Ignore these people, because it’s a trap. The second you let your guard down, the other side will be stripping away everything that’s important to you and replacing it with whatever your version of hell is. And since obviously no one wants that, the only other alternative is whatever you’re pushing. Sweet.

4. Appeal to emotion
Pay attention, dear reader, for you are on hallowed ground. In the history of defending the indefensible, perhaps nothing has ever served so well as an appeal to emotion. There’s something deep inside every human that makes them somewhat vulnerable to this attack, and only the most stalwart of your opponents will withstand its fury without injury. As to your choice of emotion, my personal favorite is fear. This applies to a wide variety of discussion types, but for politics, it might work something like this: “Candidate A is very different from Candidate B. Candidate B will destroy your way of life in these ways. Therefore, Candidate A is the right choice.” This technique works best when combined with the false dichotomy (as seen in #3), so that people feel like they’ve only got the two options. Fortunately for you, in American politics that’s usually true.

5. Feign moral outrage
When discussing the finer points of politics or religion, or any other very controversial issue, you’ve always got a great backup option if you’re faced with a wall of logic and reason: taking great offense. Do not concern yourself too much with whether the other person actually said anything worthy of taking offense to, just do your best to connect the dots as quickly as possible to lead you to an outburst of indignation. By blustering wildly as if you’re absolutely shocked and outraged that someone could stoop so low as to suggest such a thing (regardless of whether any such thing was suggested), you put the other person on the defensive and soon you’ll have them backpedaling away from whatever point of logic they were trying to make. The best moral outrage usually revolves around charges of sexism, racism, favoritism, elitism, being unpatriotic, and other incendiary terms and phrases.

6. Throw out a red herring
It does no good if, in the middle of your discussion, the other person makes a point that makes sense. The best positions are defended by those who are unwilling to admit that they could possibly be wrong in any area whatsoever. So if you feel that the conversation is shifting to an area where you might not have the upper hand, you must immediately move the discussion towards safer territory. The best way to do this is with the abrupt introduction of yet another attack, preferably one not related to the current line of discussion. This will throw the other person off balance and give you the opening you need to move forward. The other person may protest that you never sufficiently responded to their point about blah-blah-blah, but ignore them and just keep the attacks coming fast and furious. And never admit you’re wrong. Ever.

7. Complain about “media bias”
If you’re really getting hammered and you don’t seem to be able to come up with any evidence or logic to support your position, the next best thing is to attack the other guy’s sources. One of the most effective ways to do this is just to claim “media bias” for every source that disagrees with you. The great thing about this tactic is that it’s nebulous and hard to prove, which also makes it hard to disprove. It at least introduces some doubt, and leaves you free to disregard any evidence or logic they dredge up to support their position. A related tactic is to just keep repeating that the other person has been a victim of media bias, thus freeing you from having to spend any time addressing any of their actual points.

So there you have it, folks. Now get out there and start making your case, and remember, don’t let the pesky facts get in your way!

I’ve been using Mvelopes.com off-and-on for the last two years, but I’ll confess that I haven’t been so good about it for the last twelve months or so. Here’s why: it sucks. It has a horribly flash interface, is ridiculously slow and clunky, has bugs, and is always having issues with downloading my account data. It’s also completely manual, so it adds a few minutes of work every day. Let it slip for a week or two and you’ve got 50 - 75 transactions that need to be categorized using a brutally painful interface. Ugh. On top of that, it’s like $7 - 15 / month.

So why do I keep using it (or trying to)? Because when you get it rolling, it’s amazing. The envelope method of budgeting works like this: for each spending category, you put money in as you get it, based on your budget, and you take it out as you spend it. When it’s gone, it’s gone. If you don’t spend all the money in that envelope for that month, it carries over to the next month. For example, let’s say I make $2000 per month. I put $700 into a rent envelope, $200 into food, $200 into utilities, $200 into spending, $300 into savings, and $400 into gas As I spend money out of each of those categories over the month, I take that money out of the appropriate envelope. At the end of the month, if I have $45 left in the spending envelope and everything else is empty, I’ll have $245 in my spending envelope for the next month. Envelope budgeting is a great way to control spending and save for things over a long period of time, like an annual insurance payment, or Christmas gifts.

Anyway, about a year or so ago, I signed up for Mint.com, which is kind of like Quicken, but online and free. The interface was good, but this was at the height of my enthusiasm for Mvelopes, and since Mint.com was mainly about seeing how you’d already spent your money, I didn’t spend much time on it.

Fast forward twelve months and Mint.com is starting to look a lot better. It’s got more robust budgeting features, some amazing graphing, trend analysis, automatic transaction categorization, and best of all, it’s all free. But at the end of the day, it still feels more geared towards tracking the money you’ve already spent than helping you spend correctly in the future.

So should I switch? I’m not sure. I really like the envelope budgeting method, but if the interface is so horrible and painful to use that I won’t do it, it’s not really giving me much benefit. If Mint.com would just add something close to the envelope method of budgeting, I would be a customer for life. I’d gladly fork over $10 / month to never have to log into Mvelopes.com again.

I’m going to get Mint.com all setup and rocking for the rest of this month. In two weeks, I’ll evaluate where I’m at and post a status update. If it’s working well for me, I’ll stick with it and cancel Mvelopes. If anyone has found any other alternatives, I’d love to hear about them

Warning: the contents of this post are personal and probably won’t interest the majority of readers. These “progress update” posts are as much for me as anyone, but I encourage you to read through them and post any questions or encouragements in the comments. Thanks!

I’m halfway through my first month under my new goal plan, and I just wanted to give a quick update.

Habits
The first week of the month was rough…I got caught up in client work and trying to get BlueSwarm.com out the door and things unraveled quickly. I spent last week trying to get things back on track and stabilized. Things are running smoothly again and hopefully I’ll be able to keep it up through the end of the month. I’m also considering dropping the “morning pages” daily habit, but we’ll see.

Oh, and I didn’t manage to do my weekly review for GTD on Friday, so I’ll be doing it today instead

Projects
I had a bit too much on my plate, so I’ve cut one of my projects out and severely de-emphasized another. I’m hoping that this should free up some time and mental cycles. I’m hoping to clean out a couple more projects within the next few months.

Goals
My 30-day goals are going ok, but I’m running about one week behind where I should be on most of the goals. I’m going to severely kick it up a notch over the next seven days, which should put me in striking distance to most of the goals with a week to go in September. I’ve also decided to drop one of my goals, which was to go completely paperless in my record-keeping. The scanner I want to use for that costs several hundred dollars, and I feel that some other things are a higher priority right now, so I’m bumping that goal back to the 90-day mark.

Thanks to all of you who have asked how I’m doing with my goals and habits. Your interest and encouragement have been most helpful. Please continue to keep me accountable!

When I first heard that Yammer (the “twitter for business” startup) had won TechCrunch50, I had mixed feelings. On the one hand, I’ve been using Backpack’s Journal feature to do something similar with an agency that I do work with, and I immediately saw the value. It’s interesting to see what other developers or designers are up to. For a freelancer, Twitter itself is almost like working in an office, and I can see the value of doing something like a mini-twitter just within your organization.

On the other hand, it doesn’t seem that innovative or impressive from a technology standpoint, just a slightly modified take on a concept that’s been around for awhile.

But then I heard about Yammer’s business model. I’m sure this is a big part of why Yammer won, because it’s brilliant. Basically, users sign up to this thing using their corporate email address, which makes sense since they’re using it for work. It’s completely free for any employee to sign up, and they can do so without the knowledge or blessing of their employer. However, if the company wants to “claim their network” and have administrative control over the user account that their employees have, they have to pay $1 / month / account.

Here’s why this is brilliant: in a typical corporate environment, tools and services are imposed in a top-down fashion, and then HR spends tons of effort trying to get people to use them. I used to work at CNET, and we had this terrible internal productivity tracking tool that everyone was supposed to use. The interface was awful, the integration was terrible, and probably cost CNET a ton to use the service for thousands of employees. But it would have been worth it if it actually increased productivity by 1/10th of a percentage point, or allowed CNET to ferret out their most productive employees. But I doubt that it did, because the person using the system and person gaining value from the system were not the same person. Employees didn’t get much extra out of it, and largely saw it as what it was: more work so that management could keep an eye on them. All the value was to the organization, not the users.

Contrast that with Yammer. A couple people from CNET sign up, they want to see what their colleagues are doing at work, so they invite them. Some of those people sign up, invite more people, and so on. Pretty soon, hundreds of people at CNET are using Yammer to share what they’re working on, ask questions, etc. Then the organization finds out that there’s all this value locked up in Yammer, and they can pay a measly $12 / year for each employee to access that value. Think they’ll be willing to do so? You bet.

The problem with many enterprise tools is that the organization is the primary customer, and then they have to push their employees to use the tool, because the employees view it as just more work. But the brilliance of Yammer is that they’ve built a tool that infiltrates value into an organization, then charges the organization if they want to unlock that value. If you hit the users first and add value and then layer on features that the business wants, you’ve got an irresistible combination. Employees will sign up and use it on their own, without any prompting or cajoling from the organization, and the business will find that it needs to pay up to unlock all the value that employees are naturally creating because they want to. It’s a classic bottom-up strategy, and one that I’ve started to think about for some of my own entrepreneurial pursuits.