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"Don’t tell me where your priorities are. Show me where you spend your money and I’ll tell you what they are."
James W. Frick
Monitor Your Impulse Spending Urges
Here’s a good write up by Leo Babauta from Zen Habits. I love this idea. Spendly was initial created with the idea of tracking your actual income and expenses, but there’s no reason why you couldn’t use Spendly to track your impluse buy urges.Keep a small notebook handy, and every time you get an urge to buy something, practical or not, put a little tally in the notebook. Tally every urge, whether it is to buy something online, or at a store, looking at a catalog, thinking about that new iPod while at your desk, or even if it’s multiple urges to buy the same item.
Spendly vs. Pen and Paper
One of the most difficult thing about Spendly is that we’re competing against pen and paper. It’s arguably easier to track your finances using paper:
- You can keep a pad and pen in your pocket at all times.
- Its cheap, even relatively free.
- There’s nothing to learn.
To compete with paper, Spendly Online will focus on the following:
- Make it super easy to create entries from anywhere using the Web, Email, SMS, IM, Voice, Twitter, and any other way I can think. Spendly should be easily available from anywhere, anytime.
- Provide you with useful data, reports, and alerts—when and where you need it.
- Keep Spendly simple and easy to use, while also providing excellent support when needed.
- Focus on the core needs of tracking you finances. We want to keep Spendly as simple to use as pen and paper.
The first release of Spendly will not meet all of those goals, but this is a marathon, not a race. Since Spendly Online is a web application, there’s no software for you to download. New features are added instantly without any _upgrade_ process involved. We plan on releasing regular updates to Spendly Online, in order to make it the best tool for tracking your finances. Hopefully, better than pen and paper.
http://zenhabits.net/2007/02/how-i-save-money/
Apparently going vegan and not doing anything save you money. I’ll admit, I cut my own hair. I’m not sure if I could give up steak.
Spendly Online is Coming
The world of Spendly has been going through a major transformation. I’d like to give a brief overview of what’s been going on around here for the past few months, and where things are heading.
We launched the Spendly iPhone app in mid-2009. Spendly had been living in my ‘do-this-someday’ pile for too long. Designing the app was great—iPhone apps are simply fun to design. I gathered some funds and took my designs to Colin from Springs and Struts. Colin worked his magic and Spendly for iPhone—which we’ll be referring to as Spendly Touch from now on—was born.
Spendly Touch quickly rose to the top of the charts in the Finance section of the App Store. However, there’s one problem: I’m not a Cocoa Touch developer, and trust me, I’ve tried to learn. I did manage to work with one other developer to launch an small update to Spendly Touch allowing international currency. Spendly Touch is now available in every market and seems to be a popular choice for those looking for simple income and expense tracking on their iPhone.
Spendly Touch is great. So is developing native iPhone applications, and I hope to have more opportunities to create new iPhone apps in the future. Spendly Touch isn’t going anywhere, but it will remain as-is for a while. In my heart, Spendly has always been a web app. So, today I’m officially announcing Spendly Online.
Spendly Online takes what Spendly Touch does so well—easily entering basic transactions—and adds on some great improvements like tagging and reporting, while retaining a simple and appealing interface that is easy to use. If you follow me on Twitter (@shaunandrews), you’ve no doubt already had a glimpse of Spendly Online. I will be updating this blog with screenshots and videos of the upcoming application.
Were planning a private alpha preview starting Dec 15. If your interested in helping us build the simpliest online personal finance tool, let us know.
