Easy Change

One of the most interesting things that I've seen recently is the idea that people are actually tracking the percentage of their incomes across various income streams. That is, they are tracking how much they make at each job etc. Personally, almost all of my income comes from my primary job (about 95%), which is one of the things that is generally frowned upon. I'd like to really work this upcoming year on developing more passive sources of income. Income that doesn't require my intervention or my physical presence would be ideal. Real estate is the one that often comes to mind, but dividend paying stocks might be more reasonable for me so far. Not long ago, I wanted to get into buying a few shares of individual stocks and I bought a few shares of HD stock and its gone up a fair bit so that I've made about 12% on it so far. But right now I have no intention of selling. I bought it for the long-haul, not for the short-term gain.

Despite being out-of-my-mind busy this weekend, I still somehow managed to clean the house and also get started on my taxes. About 95% of the information is into the system now but it appears that I might have forgotten to include the information from my paypal account. It was interesting to discover that interest on bank accounts may still be taxable even if you didn't get a 1099 for it; in fact the 1099 limit appears to be 10 dollars from the information I was reading. Monthly Sweep One of the new techniques that I've adopted this year is to put some padding into the budget and then clean things up by sweeping some of the extra money out into the linked savings account at the end of the month; once I do that tomorrow I will be ready to start putting together the end-of-month figures for January 2007. I wonder how common this technique is. Do many of you use it?

One of my major goals for this year was to take all of the information that I had gathered and get my budgetting spreadsheet updated with all of my personal information. The way that I keep myself in check with money is by using a budget. And the way I stick to the budget is by using a simple excel spreadsheet that I created that has my own personal layout that suits me. It also serves to make sure I get my bills paid on time and keep my accounts balanced. New improvements for the 2007 spreadsheet include bill categorization. During 2006, I had all of the bills itemized which is fine and I will continue to do, but I found that I was really interested in keeping the money in categories -- but probably not the ones you are thinking of -- categories of expenses. For me, there are just three categories: recurring, debt, savings. Recurring expenses or (inescapable expenses) as I like to call them refer to expenses that happen every month and generally cannot be avoided. The sum of these ex...