
Sid Meier's Civilization Inspired Budget - personjerry
http://alexrecker.com/our-new-sid-meiers-civilization-inspired-budget/
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neogodless
I definitely like it. Because I like Civilization, and because I like when you
think about the direction and velocity of your (net worth, savings, call it
what you want) rather than "what rules should I put in place and follow?"

I've been tracking my spending (cash not withstanding) since 2003, and my
favorite part is looking at net worth changes per month, and how they change
over time. For example, if I look at 7 years, I see that I've got a rate of
$xxx but if I just look at the past 12 months it's now a much better rate of
$xxxx! Occasionally, a single day looks awful... every three months I track
changes to investment values and dividends paid out. And the past year and a
half or so has been negative almost every time! Those days "suck" but I can
still look at "how it's going in the big picture" and know we're doing
alright. We're headed in the right direction.

I hope more people try approaches like yours.

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Retric
Unless your dealing with leveraged investments, day to day swings mean very
little. Occasionally the market has a huge drop, but right after a big drop
tends to be the best times to invest in the stock market. However, mentally
people feel the need to double down when it's up and take money out when it's
down which can quickly destroy decades of growth.

PS: If you can see a 60% drop and think, yay! great time to invest then feel
free. Otherwise, checking once a year is probably fine.

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Amorymeltzer
I was initially an overly conservative investor, really couldn't accept any
risk or loss (I'm young), but tracking day to day swings helped me quite a
bit. Something about seeing changes every day, many of them negative, really
hit home the meaningless of those changes given timescale I was operating on.
I am now a much healthier investor.

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finance-geek
This is one of the big points Ben Graham makes in the classic book The
Intelligent Investor --
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Intelligent_Investor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Intelligent_Investor)

Essentially -- _unrealized_ losses don't matter unless they are _uncover-able_
losses.

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morgante
I actually have a pretty similar approach. (To be honest, Civilization's
economic system is not exactly novel.)

Except I combine the daily rate with a running treasury (each day starts with
the previous day's ending balance). All expenses must be paid out of the
treasury, so if I want to purchase something I have to save up for a while.

Importantly, the 'treasury' is separate from my actual savings, which are
deducted at a constant rate from my daily income.

The really fun part comes with estimation: I have several years of data now,
so I've been able to develop a pretty complex spreadsheet which predicts my
network over time. Every month I compare where I thought I was going to be and
where I'm at, adjusting estimates to get more accurate over time. It's gotten
to the point where I can pretty reliably predict my net worth to within $100.
(One time, I even got it right down to the cent, from 6 months out.)

~~~
dmix
How much time do you spend each day doing this? I'd love something similar but
the commitment concerns me. Also what if you miss a day (or two) and don't
remember all purchases?

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morgante
Maybe 5 minutes a day? I actually automatically download most purchases from
my credit card's website, so no effort is put into those.

Then I spend probably an hour at the end of the month doing a retrospective on
how accurate my estimates were.

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nickpsecurity
This has been a fun read given that we came up with similar methods but from
different directions. Mine wasn't Civilization inspired although I played a
lot of Meier's Alpha Centauri back in the day. :) I thought more along easily
tracking daily transactions on the goal like cashiers or accounts do with a
ledger. No online integration, forecasting, etc. Fairly simple addition,
subtraction, arbitrary values if needed, and daily/monthly reports.

I also divided my expenses by the day but also the week: paid weekly. Had to
make sure I never went passed the minimum I needed for bills. Also, made sure
I had enough in the account for my largest, non-rent bill as splitting it by
day didn't guarantee the amount would be there. Far as ledger, I went with
MoneyWise app for Android. Just loaded it, typed in description/amount, hit
save, and done. Can set to an arbitrary balance which gave me starting point
(or occasional reset). Then, remove amount for day at the beginning or at
least once I woke up haha. Then, just continue tracking expenses.

Might try your method at some point as it's interesting.

Note: Originally posted in Disqus on the page. Reposted here for anyone else's
benefit.

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ctrlaltdel121
I always like seeing people find new ways to manage their money, but you seem
to take issue with estimation and categorization, which are (IMHO) the
fundamental pieces of a budget that actually create behavior changes.

The point of estimating your expenses is to cause surprise and provoke thought
when your estimates are terrible. The point of categorization is to aggregate
expenses into larger groups to help find places to cut. Maybe you don't see
"$40 for dinner" as a crazy expense but summed over a month it turns out
"$1000 on food" is crazy.

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bwang29
Also a fan of Civ5 and all turned based games. Another extra thought:

In Civ you will know that building such Monument will take X turns or making
some other technology progress will consume Y science points. I was thinking
that it would be cool to be able to track when and how long someone will be
able to afford something. It would be extra cool if this could factor in stock
options you received in a company or any other assets so that you can draw a
projection of the 10 year finance based on current earning/churn.

~~~
Amorymeltzer
I do this in a little spreadsheet just for major items, one-off items — think
plane tickets, hotels, wedding gifts, etc. A rough estimate of income and
expenses per month gives me a good idea of "how long" those things cost. The
extra time dimension is helpful when evaluating and considering other choices.

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cableshaft
Turn it into a book, sell it, and see your money per day REALLY shoot up!

Seriously, that's very clever, and you have the same complaints about existing
systems that I do. As a fellow Civ V fan, I'm eager to give this a shot.

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ryandrake
I like the idea as a way to track daily averages, and I'm going to definitely
try it for myself. But it doesn't help me with what causes my nose to be
buried in Quicken every Sunday: bills don't get paid little by little daily.
They come at fixed times in the month (or year). This system doesn't help with
the tactics of making sure there's the right amount in your checking account
at the right time. Ive had many close calls where my paycheck is every two
weeks but bills are monthly, and 2x2 weeks ≠ 1 month.

I think I'd like a service that let me get paid 1/14th of a paycheck every day
and also pay [1/28 | 1/29 | 1/30 | 1/31] of my bills every day. Then, your
day-to-day finances are literally an exercise of making sure there's always a
small balance and that the pay-bill spread always remains positive.

~~~
zrail
YNAB has the concept of a "buffer", which is just the idea that you have
enough in your checking account to pay for an entire month on the first of the
month. That way, your bills come out of your buffer and your paychecks
replenish it.

This is separate from the idea of an emergency or rainy day fund, which should
be an additional 3-6 months expenses in an easy-to-access account, like a
linked savings account.

I realize that if you're currently living paycheck-to-paycheck this can seem
daunting. Definitely check out the video lessons on the YNAB site, and think
about buying the software. There's probably a way to implement it in Quicken,
but I have no idea.

[https://www.youneedabudget.com/support/training-and-
educatio...](https://www.youneedabudget.com/support/training-and-education)

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lfowles
I was writing something longer, but essentially +1 YNAB. The videos you refer
to also go over how to build up that buffer while you're living paycheck to
paycheck.

Some might be turned off by having to manually input charges, by having to
plan a budget each month, by being offended that they "could do the same thing
in a weekend with Excel", but it's the best solution I've found for my wife
and I. Not automated enough that we get disconnected from finances, but smart
enough that we can easily see where we stand and run a few reports on our
spending.

The system is pretty flexible, there's no need to categorize every stick of
gum you buy, just use your best judgement and try not to cheat yourself.

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vinceguidry
I have a personal Rails site that does something like this. There's an Expense
model and a Expenditure model. Also a PayEvent model that's kinda the opposite
of Expense, could probably roll them into one model. The Expenses are averaged
out by month. An expense can be 'tracked', that means when I'm adding an
individual expenditure, I can list it as that expense. My dashboard tells me
at a glance how much I've spent on those expenses. If it's not tracked, it is
factored in automatically.

It is multi-user, though I'm the only user at the moment. If anyone wants to
give it a whirl, shoot me an email which you can find in my profile.

My philosophy is to avoid the banking APIs by putting in expenditures
manually. I would love to integrate with OFX, but I don't have the time to
maintain it.

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Nullabillity
Reading through the blog post, it just seems more and more obvious that this
is _the right_ approach. Very nice work, and I'll definitely try to set up
something similar for myself.

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mcrist0
Author here. Thanks, I really appreciate it. I'm so pumped that people are
feeling this - I did not expect it to get so much attention.

I am definitely considering turning it into a solution that everyone can use.
I have plenty of work to do on it and the weekend can't come fast enough.

~~~
msandford
Yeah this seems like the kernel of a project that could eventually be a
product. I don't know if you're up for that, but if you are I'd encourage you
to chase it. Bootstrapped businesses are great!

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trentlott
I love this, and did something similar.

If you haven't thought of it already, some estimations are probably worth
considering - electricity and water can be more or less stable, and you might
benefit from taking those baseline costs out of your calculation.

Also, it might be useful to add metadata in the form of tags or tag-groups in
your spreadsheet; this will give you a bigger/more nuanced dataset if/when you
have a hankering to analyze your behavior.

Less usefully, it would be cool if it _looked_ like Civ.

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chucksmash
This makes me really happy to see. For whatever reason analyzing finances is
enjoyable in a Civ-ish way though I never would have made the connection.

A couple of things I've noticed as I've done something similar:

1) Categorizing the little things as you go along was way too tedious for me
too - even in really stripped down form. I really like the idea of
categorizing All The Things though. How I dealt with this was to download 90
representative days worth of credit card history into LibreOffice and remove
all of the "still gets paid even if I'm cryogenically frozen" payments. I then
manually categorize everything that is left (quick because the categorization
is batched up and auto-complete works wonders), divide by 90 and generate a
pivot table that shows the daily sum of each of the categories. Where I think
we diverge though is that rather than trying to keep this snapshot up to date,
I just make a mental note of it as "Okay, I average $XX/day on everything
else".

As long as you know your starting CC balance then it's pretty easy to figure
out how you are doing for the pay period. Just a matter of $start + $daily_cc
* $days.

2) Kinda similar to the web app (in spirit if not functionality), I set up a
little Python CLI tool that simulates my recurring expenses (along with my
recurring $XX "all other crap" fund from above). Once you've set up the
recurrence relations you can step through two weeks at a time, pausing to
change state, transfer money, etc. It's basically like using a debugger which
is an enjoyable way to test out various ideas you have that's a little bit
more freeform than a spreadsheet where its hard to see how various ad hoc
tweaks layer on top of one another over time.

~~~
brownbat
It's interesting, I religiously categorize everything in Mint, but now that I
think about it, I basically never use those categories for anything.

Maybe I should just categorize everything as "spending" and get over it.

(I can imagine ways that granularity should be helpful, like if one area got
out of control, or for tax reasons if I ran a business or had a HSA, but
they've just never come up.)

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Pyxl101
I've always wondered why finance continues to run on a monthly cycle. Why
isn't that kind of tracking more continuous? It seems to introduce artificial
and harmful effects, like people trying to "game their numbers" at the end of
a month.

It seems like reporting ought to be continuous and instantaneous.

I imagine there are historical reasons why things have worked that way, since
it was inconvenient for humans to compute aggregations any more frequently.
However, now we have computers. Why report on a month or quarter or year? Why
not look at the report every day, or as often as needed?

~~~
ctrlaltdel121
The point of doing a budget on a monthly cycle is that most bills are monthly
bills. I also have days where I spend half a paycheck and days where I spend
zero dollars, so how much money I gained or lost in a day is of almost no
relevance.

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w4
This is absolutely fantastic. I'd pay for something that hooks into my bank
account and spits out a daily number for me, no problem (especially since it
doesn't suffer from the mess of housekeeping and categorizing that something
like Mint does, which is my biggest complaint about that kind of software).

If you don't build it, I'll probably wind up hacking it together for myself.
:)

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personjerry
I think you're either going to use Mint or Yodlee for the API as they have
partnerships with the major banks, while the banks themselves don't provide
the APIs, I believe.

~~~
swsieber
Or Plaid - I think partnered with Intuit (Mint) to get support for smaller
banks. They have a very simple yet great api.

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jldugger
> I was tired of trying to assess how we were doing financially while our
> account balance was jumping around so dramatically month to month. I wished
> instead that money could come in and go out more consistently - like water
> draining from a faucet.

Congratulations, you've independently invented double entry accounting. Beware
that applying it to PF is highly addictive ^_^

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ohthehugemanate
Great post. I love your thinking, and the code that goes with it!

But in the end, this seems exactly like normal envelope method accounting
software, but without bank integration and with a daily view. You just have
one big envelope for "Daily spending" which can be anything. You still keep an
envelope for each bill, and you still keep an envelope for each irregular bill
and big ticket item.

A system like YNAB could eclipse this by simply adding a daily view, and
reinforcing their point about keeping your estimated spending categories few
and broad. You could switch to YNAB (or whatever) seamlessly, and have your
bank transactions pulled in automatically.

Am iImissing something?

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zhte415
Another term for 'estimations' in this article is accruals. That is, putting
away some expected spending for a future expense.

For managing expenses, Excel is sufficient.

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badloginagain
Great work, awesome how finding a system for you can really get your finances
under control.

Now you just have to determine how long it will take you to hurry "wonders"...
ie. buying a house, retirement, etc.

Also, have you looked into your financial institution to see if there's an API
for automatically pulling your purchases? The only problem with your system
now is it require constant vigilance to keep adding purchases.

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DLarsen
Very cool. I like the way the short feedback loop is materialized. My wife and
I have our own home-brewed flavor of budgeting that takes a more introspective
approach to the feedback... spending is tagged with circumstantial and
behavioral traits (impulsive, well-planned, unexpected-guests, etc...) with
the idea of tuning (and perhaps more importantly) aligning our mutual decision
making process.

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floatrock
The Daily/Weekly/Monthly/Yearly summary is interesting.

These are all rates, so presumably they're the same order of magnitude, right?

Have you tried making a plot of all these values by day? eg see that your
weekly rate for the last few days has been diverging down from your monthly
rate, so maybe you should start to slow down after that binge last week and
recover.

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nunodonato
As a person who is always looking for better ways to budget, I really loved
your method. I dont think I can apply it, though, as I work as a freelancer
and there is not concept of regular paycheck which I can use to get an
estimate daily income..

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CarVac
I just set up the first spreadsheet shown in the post, and having that _magic
number_ of net daily recurring income is very...elucidating.

I feel like I suddenly have a much better grasp of actually how much money I
make.

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PhasmaFelis
I read his wife's name and had to go check that Marissa Meier, wife of Sid
Meier, is not the same person as Merissa Meyer, CEO of Yahoo.

~~~
lfowles
Presumably his wife's name is Marissa Recker, seeing that the author is Alex
Recker.

Sid Meier, on the other hand, is a gaming legend[0].

[0]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sid_Meier](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sid_Meier)

~~~
PhasmaFelis
Right, duh. I know who Sid Meier is, but I got confused as to his precise
association with this article.

In any case, I think we have conclusively determined that neither Sid Meier
nor Alex Recker is married to the CEO of Yahoo.

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zurn
What's a "checking balance"?

~~~
roryokane
The balance in someone’s checking account. A checking account is the bank
account that written checks take money from, as opposed to a savings account.

