Top 10 I Learned from Becoming Debt-Free

As promised, here are the top 10 things I learned from hitting my goal of being debt free.

1. Quit going deeper in debt! In other words, the first step to get out of a hole is to stop digging! I know it's common sense, but you wouldn't know it with how some people act. I was that way for a while.

2. Budgets aren't bad. A budget isn't paying your bills and then spending the least money possible. That's no fun, and it's not wonder budgets get a bad reputation if that's what people think they are. A budget, or spending plan if you prefer, is decided how you are going to spend your money before you get it.

3. Things go better if you have someone to talk to. I love spending money on computer stuff. My wife is super-frugal. Together we balance each other out nicely. From what I've heard, this is very common for married couples but you wouldn't know it unless you work TOGETHER to be smart with your money. For those of you who are single, find someone you respect & trust when it comes to finances to talk to.

4. Be out of debt & have an emergency fund before you buy a house. We nearly lost ours when I was laid off because we didn't do this. This is where about half of our credit card debt came from.

5. When buying a house, be sure you have enough money to buy stuff to put in the house. This goes along with item #1.

6. Keeping with the house theme, don't buy more house than you can afford. When we bought our house, the crack-headed rules they have would have let us buy a massively expensive house. If we bought the house they said we could afford, we would have had enough money to pay the house payment, electricity, and enough gas to get to work and back.

7. Things go much better when you have a goal to shoot for.

8. The goal has to have a time limit. Getting debt free went so much faster once we had a set time to hit the goal: Christmas 2007.

9. The goal must be believable. I'm sure we didn't do as well as we could for a while because it just seemed like such a huge deal.

10. It is good to have rewards for hitting goals, just make sure they are in proportion to your achievement and keep you going in the right direction. For example, if your goal is to lose weight, don't celebrate by pigging out at an all-you-can eat buffet. Going out for sushi may a good way to enjoy that - you'd be continuing your habit of eating healthy. Just don't eat too much of it!

When we started trying to get out of debt, I had a goal of paying off our credit cards and write down "buy a new laptop" for the reward. That would have delayed paying off the student loans at least a month!

Quick date entry in Moneydance 2007

I stumbled across a cool little feature in Moneydance 2007 recently. It may be in early versions, but this is the first version I've seen it.

When entering transactions when you enter the date I'd been typing the whole date or using the arrow keys to edit the date. I found out if you enter the month and date such as 2/25 it will auto-fill the year. If you just put the date, it will fill in the current month and year. So if you just type 25 right now (February 25, 2007) you'll get 2/25/2007.

Moneydance 2007 keyboard shortcut tip

When I switched back to Moneydance after using other personal finances software for almost a month, I had a few transactions to enter and then had to balance my accounts. One of them had quite a few transactions to mark as cleared. It seemed like it would take a while. I accidentally found a shortcut that makes it pretty fast.

1. Click on the account you want to reconcile and hit "Actions" and then "Reconcile"
2. Enter the ending balance and hit "OK".
3. You'll have a list of all the deposits and withdrawals for that account that have not been marked as cleared yet. Find the earliest transaction that has cleared and click on the field that indicates if it has cleared yet.
4. Once that transaction has been marked as cleared, hit the down arrow on your keyboard.
   
5. This should select the next transaction in the list and mark it as cleared too.
6. Repeat hitting the down arrow until all the cleared transactions have been marked as cleared.

I wonder how many other little shortcuts like this are in Moneydance that I don't know about?