“Adrià says he doesn’t listen to customers, yet his customers are some
of the most satisfied in the world. That’s an interesting riddle to
consider.”

One of the conversation’s participants, Phil, then noted that

“All indications point to Apple/Steve Jobs using the same strategy. El Bulli isn’t at all a mass market success, but the other is. Interesting indeed.”

Gastronomy and my favourite computers, together at last? That really got me going…

The key thing about both Adrià and Jobs is that they’ve taken a leap of faith, choosing to focus primarily on producing the best things they can – this, to me, is the primary goal of both businesses. Apple rarely if ever competes on price – in their view of the world, the profitability/viability of the business seems to be more of a constraint on how good they can make something, not a primary factor in considering how to build it.

This can seem expensive – Adrià’s huge test kitchen (not even mentioned in the HBS article) is an utterly ridiculous extravagance for one small restaurant out in the middle of the Spanish countryside. You can get a taste of the test kitchen (and the things that happen there) from this section of Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservations…

Apple. meanwhile, has taken some product ideas through many, many stages of development before deciding to shelve them entirely.

As Michael Lopp explained during an interesting session at SXSWi 2007, designers at Apple are often specifically briefed to come up with “whatever you can think of” in the early stages of product development, with no consideration of practicality or cost. They will produce around ten different designs, which are then pared down towards “the best stuff we can think of, within the constraints of shipping a profitable product”.

The key thing here, and the common thread between Apple and  Adrià is to truly believe that “if you build the best, they will come.”

As to the relative “mass market”-ness of the two, the biggest reason elBulli isn’t a mass-market success is that they’ve chosen not to be. Adrià could open a London elBulli, A New York elBulli and a Paris elBulli tomorrow, and all three would have overflowing reservation books. But a distributed restaurant empire would make it impossible to ensure the attention to detail and quality which makes the original restaurant so celebrated. And since producing “the best” is his absolute focus, expanding the restaurant would make no sense.

This is precisely why he’s branched out with Fast Good – it’s an opportunity to produce the “best possible convenience food experience” – a different set of constraints to being “the best dining experience in the world.”

“The best” is subjective, and depends partly on your market and the constraints under which you operate. But we live in a world where many companies seem to aim for “just good enough”, where “customer care” is a frustrating, maze-like mess and most products are serviceable but uninspiring. In such a world, it’s sometimes refreshing to remember that there is another way. That striving for excellence over budget streamlining; aiming for a defined audience rather than the mass-market can lead to the production of truly wonderful things, without necessarily sacrificing a sustainable, profitable business in the process.

The problem comes when something good is released, but doesn’t find its way onto eMusic. Then I have a dilemma – do I wait and see if it turns up later (which it often does, 2-3 months after release), or do I turn to an alternative option – buying the album on iTunes (frequently DRM-plagued) or Amazon (no DRM, just the stinging guilt of disloyalty to my girlfriend…), or getting the CD (no DRM, less guilt, more physical objects cluttering up my apartment…)

The upshot is often that I’ll dither for quite a while after a record comes out before shelling out cash for it, which means I’m sometimes hopelessly out of date on key releases.

So it is with Fleet Foxes, whose album I finally got around to buying in November, some 5 months after its actual release. I don’t feel completely left out on this one – I saw them play a fantastic show at SXSW in March, so I knew what some of the fuss was about. But still, 5 months is a long time to wait to properly listen to what is, in my opinion, the best album of the year.

Let’s get the cringe-worthy crap out of the way first. Beach Boys, Crosby Stills and Nash, Simon and Garfunkel, blah blah blah.

What’s fantastic about the Fleet Foxes’ first album (called, originally, “Fleet Foxes”) is that, yes, it reminds you of lots of acts. But really, it isn’t like any of them. Actually achieving this these days is a surprisingly difficult feat to pull off – just ask Coldplay (“here’s our Radiohead song; here’s our U2 song; here’s our Eno song…”).

The Beach Boys references seem to come from the solidly surf-style guitar underpinning many of the more energetic songs, whilst the more ‘folksy’ comparisons are obviously picked up from the combination of soft acoustic guitar and shameless harmonising.

You can keep comparing – at their crescendo (on, say, “Heard Them Stirring”) the choir-like harmonisations sound more like the most triumphal moments of Sufjan Stevens’ “Illinoise”. Or maybe the Polyphonic Spree, minus-tiresome-cult-overtones. The record is also awash with reminiscences (deep bass, those surf guitars) of the Crystal Skulls, which is unsurprising given Christian Wargo’s appearance.

(Side Note: searching for the Crystal Skulls on Youtube is painful, thanks to a glut of Indiana-Jones-related nonsense, still, here’s a live performance:

)

I could bang on and on and on about the Fleet Foxes record – it’s a rare thing in being an album which never really lets up, deeply satisfying little hooks and turns falling from it throughout its length. Rare is the day, these days, when I actually listen to an album without skipping at least 1 track.

And, in keeping with the season, it offers up an unmistakably wintery/Christmassy song which is (oh rare and precious thing) actually not completely annoying:

Yay! Snow!

They shared some elements of their visual language, but what was most striking was the stylistic similarity to “What Barry Says”, a pretty bleak critique of US militarism from 2003:

Now, I was always a bit suspicious of old Barry – while some of his points hit home, the entire thing was cloaked in the sort of overblown language (“War Corporatism”?) which you usually hear peddled by the Trots who sell the Socialist Worker around London. Without the stunning visuals accompanying it, his narrative just comes across as a directionless paranoid rant.

Nevertheless, the overall effect is reasonably stirring. For my money, though, today’s 2 videos were far more effective

First up, we have “Iran: A Nation of Bloggers”, a succinct and moving summary of young Iranians’ embrace of blogging as a way to protest the wrong direction many of them see their own country taking:

And then we have a speech by Harvey Milk (who’s obviously in the news again right now), set to modern visuals and a bit of mildly stirring music:

It’s almost become trite, in the wake of Obama’s presidential campaign, to talk about “hope” and “change” – but to me the contrast between 2003′s paranoid rant and 2008′s uplifting hopefulness really hit home. All the more because, despite the phenomenal victory of our President-Elect a month ago, the economic outlook is crushingly bleak; even as Obama won, bigotry claimed a victory in California; people are scared, confused and uncertain.

And yet hopeful. If everything else is washed away, it seems we still have that.

They’re never far from the surface of the band’s songs, often taking on central roles in the way a guitar might elsewhere, and the effect is beautiful. It’s a refuge from the standard guitar-bass-drums-vocals formula which makes up a large portion of modern Rock.

I have a particular fondness for horns in popular music, which I can trace back to the protracted Britpop period. For many people, Britpop might be most memorable as a Tabloid-newspaper-fueled “feud” between Oasis and Blur (with Jarvis Cocker standing bemusedly off to one side muttering about underwear), but to me there was a much easier, and more rewarding way to establish the ebb and flow of the movement – horns. Namely, the Kick Horns. Whenever I bought a new CD, I’d scan the liner notes for evidence of the Kick Horns’ presence. You could claim to be “Britpop” without them, but it all rang a bit hollow.

The thing about the Kick Horns, interesting as their ubiquity was, their contribution was generally to add an upbeat, triumphal air to Britain’s poppy opuses. Or opii. Or whatever the correct plural is. Horns these days though, they’ve moved on a bit. Rather than being the shiny detailing on a song which is underpinned by something else, they’ve moved a little more into the fore, and broadened their range – from Jazz stylings to Mariachi leanings to Marching Band pomp.

And yet, important as the horns are to Beirut, it’s actually deeply unfair of me to focus on them. Beirut’s music is made of a far more complex interplay of elements. Accordion; trombone; violin; Jack Condon’s distinctive voice; wheely bins.

Um, well, at least, there’s wheely bins in this fantastic version of Nantes, recorded in the streets of Paris:

Since Simon is firmly stuck in the music of an increasingly distant decade, the premise here is simple: to highlight interesting artists and tracks which are, ahem, somewhat more recent. Using the same meandering-narrative-spliced-with-Youtube format which has served him so well.

How recent is “more recent”? I’m starting with a “last 5 years” rule-of-thumb, hopefully with a heavier emphasis on new(ish) releases, as and when I get my hands on them.

We’re kicking off somewhere completely arbitraty, mainly because this song happens to be the current one which I can’t skip past if I see it skit by on the iPhone.

Behold, Shearwater’s “Rooks”!

It’s beautiful, wintry, evocative, and depressing as fuck. Key “stuck on repeat” moment: 1:37 in when the lyric “we’ll sleep until the world of man is paralyzed” crashes into a mournful New Orleans trumpet line which would be startling if such things hadn’t been done to death by Beirut recently (more on them next week).

To be honest, the track is very much the stand-out on the album (“Rook”, Matador, 2008), which is certainly listenable, but not worthy of many repeat plays as a whole. Shearwater are often most interesting when they remind you of someone else.

“Home Life”, for example, makes me think of the interminable “Natural Beauty” which closes Neil Young’s “Harvest Moon”… not that it’s a musical reference which everyone is going to leap at, but it reminds me of sitting in a field in the middle of nowhere watching the sun go down when I was 15.

“The Snow Leopard”, on the other hand, spends a whole five minutes threatening to turn into Radiohead’s “Pyramid Song”, which is just odd.

Photo of voting booths courtesy of nshepard on Flickr.

By November 4th, I suspect that a lot of people in America are going to be heartily sick of hearing about voter fraud.

Over the past week, the spectre of widespread voter fraud has been relentlessly pursued by various factions, most of them aligned on the Republican side of the bitterly divided 2-horse American political system.

So, do we really need UN Election monitors at the polls? Will this election be decided by shadowy “leftist” groups who manage to nefariously concoct millions of fake ballots nationwide?

In a word, no.

Most of the current allegations are centered around ACORN, an activist group who run voter-recruitment drives across the US. ACORN’s fundamental problem lies in their operational methods – they pay canvassers by the number of registration forms they bring in.

Obviously, for some canvassers, this offers a temptation – fill in a few extra forms with fake names, and earn some extra cash. ACORN claims that they try to vet these forms, but it’s almost certain that their vetting procedures can’t detect every fraudulent registration.

But, ultimately, none of this actually matters.

Fake names on the electoral register do not automatically mean that fraudulent votes will be cast. In actual fact, it’s highly unlikely that they would be, for a very simple reason.

Vote fraud is a felony, and in order to commit it (and get away with it) on the scale needed to tip an election, you’d need hundreds of thousands of fraudulent votes.

Logistically, any one fraudulent voter is unlikely to be able to vote more than 4 or 5 times in one day. They’d need to cast each vote at a different polling place (lest they were recognised casting a second ballot), and there aren’t that many polling places.

This means you’d need, at absolute minimum, 20,000 people in a state willing to risk multiple Felony conviction for their candidate. Now, it could be argued that the fake registrations some ACORN canvassers are turning in can also lead to a felony conviction (they have in the past), but the risk/reward dynamic is very different there – the (often fairly poor) canvassers are trading off the risk of getting caught against the reward of extra money.

Fraudulent ballot-casters would be extremely unlikely to be paid for their efforts, unless there was such a systemic vote-rigging operation in place that it had access to hundreds of thousands of dollars to pay off its fake voters. Without leaving a paper trail.

So where, exactly, are you going to find tens of thousands of people to participate, without reward, in what would be the greatest group-felony in history?

It’s certainly not going to be the one-size-fits-all “illegal immigrant” boogeyman.

I can tell you, as a legal alien in the US, that any felony activity will see a foreigner (whether here legally or otherwise) deported and refused entry for at least 10 years. Given that people are here because they have jobs, friends, families and partners, the risk of being torn away from one’s entire life is not worth risking for any kind of political conviction. Those “illegals” who commit crimes are a minority, and sure, some of them might crawl across a desert and sneak over the border again, but you’re unlikely to find 20,000 such people per state.

All in all, then, the existence of an enormous, rich, shadowy “underground vote-fraud cartel” seems highly, laughably unlikely. It seems even more unlikely, given that the allegations are all focussed on fake Democratic registrations, at a time when the Democratic candidate is showing a significant lead in every poll, and has been for weeks.

So, what’s with all the “voter fraud” news stories?

I believe that the GOP is fighting two fronts here.

On the one hand, casting doubt over millions of new-voter registrations in the lead up to election day could gum up the works enough that sizable numbers of voters aren’t allowed to cast their ballot.

Just this week in Ohio, it’s been ruled that the state must immediately enact a new system to check new voter registrations, of which there have been 660,000 this year. If it proves impossible to do this, it’s possible (and no-one really knows how likely) that many of those voters could be turned away on November 4th, a useful result for the Republicans, who are trailing slightly in a close race in that state.

Given the current state-of-play in this race, though, I doubt this would be enough to ensure a Republican victory on a national scale. McCain is fighting a rearguard action in several previously-safe GOP states, and has already pulled out of states which were once considered “swing”. Based on current numbers, even victories in Florida, Ohio and Virginia, as well as too-close-to-call North Carolina would still leave him well short of 270 electoral votes. He’d need to turn around Nevada, North Dakota, Missouri and then erase a 5% poll lead in Colorado to clinch the presidency.

It’s faintly possible, at an extreme long-shot, but it’s a hell of a lot of work to do in just two weeks across the entire Union, at a time when McCain is completely locked out of the chief dynamic of the race.

Which is why I believe that the RNC has another reason for pushing the ACORN-baiting hard, and pushing it now.

It’s all about November 5th, and the days that follow.

One thing that sustained Democrats’ morale through their defeats in both 2000 and 2004 was the notion that their candidate had been “robbed” by partisan dabbling in the vote-counting. Whether it was Florida for Gore, or Ohio for Kerry, the popular Democratic narrative in both elections was that voter-disenfranchisement had led to their unfair defeat.

The rights and wrongs of either side’s claims in these matters are irrelevant. What was important was the story which could bring people together; hold them in, and keep them believing in their chosen party. In some ways, I think this was dangerous – the possibility of an Ohio miscount for Kerry overshadowed the fundamental problems with the candidate (that he was about as charismatic as a park bench), and probably held the Democrats back from a more careful, honest re-examination of their message and their electoral strategy.

Regardless, it’s ancient history now, but it’s a useful and informative lesson for GOP strategists who must be, at the very least, making contingency plans for a 2008 presidential defeat.

The prospect of a President Obama is particularly dangerous for the GOP, since his entire political style is one of moderation, consideration and pragmatism.

The Obama I’ve seen campaign seems to be (for all that this might make some more-liberal Americans wince) something of a centrist, and if he wins, and assumes the presidency with the same measured approach, it’s possible that he could win over some of the flagging moderate GOP base who are deeply tired of the reckless abandonment of Fiscal Conservatism, and the over-pandering to the far-right which have marked the Bush years.

A President Obama, in other words, could cause a small but significant shift in the two-party power balance. It’s not that likely – Americans support their Party the same way they support their Baseball team – through any number of missteps, mistakes and bad performances. Besides, whoever the next President is, his primary job is going to be keeping a sinking ship afloat, leaving scant time and resources for large-scale, political-landscape-altering changes.

But if you’re a GOP strategist looking 4, 8, 12 or 20 years out, you’ve got to be considering the possibility, and preparing for it by sowing the seeds of doubt and mistrust. It’s a lot easier to pull your party (or your sports team) together behind a “we did great, but the other guy cheated” message than a “we sucked” message.

A quick note: I’m a Brit who’s been living in the US for 4 years and watching this election cycle with more than a little bemusement. I’m a taxpayer who’s not eligible to vote, which means I’m viewing the whole electoral process from a weird, bystander position. Whilst I personally believe that Obama is the better candidate for President in this race, the intent of the above isn’t to lay out a partisan case, but more to examine the meta-narrative behind this particular piece of the campaign cycle. As with many things in life, the subtle details beneath the “surface story” are often more interesting than the story itself.

This year at SXSWi, I was invited to take part in 20×2, an event where 20 people are given 2 minutes each to answer an “open-ended question”. The question this year was “What is the difference?”

I was blown away by the range and quality of the other participants’ answers. This was my humble effort, delivered as a straight-up talk.

The difference, in a word, is passion.

In all our pursuits and endeavours, it is passion which leads to the creation of the genuinely great, or the superlative experience.

Thank about it – who do you most associate with passion; Steve Jobs and his irritatingly exquisite products, painstakingly put together by folks who care about the minutest details or… well… Bill Gates?

I’ve seen the effects of passion in the panels I’ve attended here at South by Southwest. All of the best panels have been hosted by people with a genuine passion for what they’re talking about.

In all honesty, some of them have had so little real content that they’ve actually subtracted from the sum of human knowledge.

But when that nebulous non-content is delivered with infectious passion, it still has value. The raw emotion itself inspires, leading us to new insights and ideas.

The greatest music ever produced, from the snarl of the Sex Pistols to the intricate scales of Rachmaninov, is fired through with deep, passionate enthusiasm and dedication. And the same is true for every other creative field:

The writing of Dickens or Ginsberg or Phillip Pullman; the art of Rothko or Monet; superlative graphic design or exquisitely prepared food by chefs like Thomas Keller – passion informs all of these things.

Life… is better with passion. It crackles with electricity a little more; sings a little more.

So my plea to all of you is this: let go of all those other influences on the things you do. Shut out the shareholders, investors, editors or producers; ignore the spreadsheets, monthly growth charts and budgets. Whatever it is you do in life; however you do it, feed your creativity with your passions, be they kittens or cushions, candles or cattle-prods, cocktails or cave-paintings.

Channel that energy into everything you do. It’s the easiest, most fulfilling way to truly make a difference.

In the vast pantheon of multinational corporations, few are more hell-bent on willfully causing international confusion and consternation than the Hershey’s empire.

Even after two years on the West Coast, as a Brit I am still not 100% sure what lies under any given tastefully-designed candy bar wrapper.

For example, let us take the American staples “Milky Way” and “Three Musketeers”. Both fine blends of sugar, fat and various unnatural syrups for sure. But for me, years of childhood wonder must be suppressed in order to remember that, in fact, what Americans call “Milky Way” is marketed in my homeland as a “Mars Bar”. Meanwhile the American “Three Musketeers” is, in the Land of Tea and Questionable Dentistry, a “Milky Way”.

(A note for the pedantic: “Three Musketeers” is not exactly the same as the British “Milky Way”. The British version has denser nougat, but there’s a definite shared design ethic going on.)

The transposition of these names is particularly, egregiously confusing, but they’re not the only Hershey’s confections to suffer from odd transatlantic translations.

I am convinced that somewhere in the Product Naming Department of Hershey’s there is a small and slightly odd little man by the name of J. Edgar Grosderriere. As a boy, J. Edgar had an unremarkable and perfectly happy early childhood; a close-knit group of young schoolfriends; loving and supportive parents. Unfortunately, around the age of 8, J. Edgar’s class began studying the French language. With a distressing inevitability, J. Edgar’s classmates quickly improved their French-to-English translation skills. In just a few short months, J. Edgar was forever re-christened “Hugeass” and his daily life plunged into a maelstrom of misery and torment.

Bereft of confidence in the face of his ridiculous moniker, J. Edgar has never known the love of a good woman, preferring to spend much of his time sequestered away in laboratories full of chocolate. As a result he’s developed a few eccentricities, the worst of which is the tendency for his sexual frustration to spill over into his work.

Hershey’s management have considered letting J. Edgar go. They’ve considered quietly rejecting all his suggestions for candy names. But he cuts such an odd figure that he evokes a real sense of pity in all who know him.

“The guy’s named Hugeass for God’s sake. How much harm can the odd strange candy name do?” they say to one another.

This, at least, is the only way I can plausibly explain the American names of my two favourite childhood chocolate products, known to me in those more innocent days as “Malteasers” and “Bounty”.

Not for the American market such benign and innocent names, oh no. Thanks to the sorry history of J. Edgar Grosderriere I must instead seek out the pleasures of “Whoppers” and “Mounds”.

Yes, “Whoppers” and “Mounds”. It is hard for me to eat these things with a straight face. Furthermore, I have discovered, it is hard to eat without a straight face – your teeth end up in weird places. Be that as it may, I have little choice if I wish to savour chocolate-coated malted biscuit or candied coconut. Because every single time as I’m opening the packaging, the product name emblazoned on the side, my head fills with bad 70s porn dialogue and “bowchikkabowbow” guitar lines.

“Oh wow. I can’t get enough of those Mounds. Now, honey, get ready to wrap your mouth around a Whopper…”

This is the ninth (and final) part of a series on setting up a financial plan.
The beginning of the series is here.
The previous article is “Financial Tools: Budget Tracking/Planning“.

So here we are, all set up with the right tools to build a better financial future. Hooray! But now that the initial hard work is (mostly) over, it’s time to step back for a moment and get some perspective.

All the plans, account setups, expense reductions and general thinking about money I’ve done in the past few months has changed a lot of my perspectives.

I don’t walk into a store and blindly buy things I want right now any more, because every dollar I spend is a dollar that could be working for me elsewhere. And I’m truly grateful for the change, because it will have a marked positive effect in the future.

But like all new interests, obsessions and endeavours, it’s easy to get carried away and become single-minded about them – checking spreadsheets every 30 minutes, and vowing never to spend a red cent on anything ever again – because it could be invested.

Being obsessed has been good for a few months – I’ve put in a lot of spadework and made a lot of decisions which set me on the right path. But now it’s time to let those decisions and tools work for themselves, and think a bit more philosophically about how my life and my finances mesh together.

For me, the quintessential point to base this thinking around is my snowboard.

It’s actually less than 2 years since I first strapped on a board and pushed my way down the green slopes at Kirkwood, discovering in the process that I was much better on a board than I’d ever thought I could be. That first season was one of discovery (first painful crash, first successful lift exit, first run all the way down a hill without falling on my ass…), and the winter 06/07 season was one of falling utterly, absolutely in love with boarding.

The trouble is that snowboarding is an expensive pastime for a city dweller 3 hours from the nearest slopes. Factor in transport costs (gas or possibly airfares), lodging costs, lift tickets, resort food prices and equipment costs and you’re looking at easily north of $1000 per season.

$1000 is a lot of money, even more if you consider what that $1000 could do with compound interest over 20 or 30 years…

The new, finance-obsessed me could very easily say “look, you should give up the snowboarding and save the money instead,” and, from a purely logical dollars-in-the-bank perspective, he’d be right.

But I love boarding with a passion that’s hard to describe. I want to experience the thrill of whizzing through beautiful winter scenery every second that I can – so much so that we’re still nearly 3 months from season’s start and I can’t stop thinking about it! I was excited this Wednesday by unseasonably early rain, because it dumped up to 2″ of snow on Tahoe and just maybe (superstitiously, unreasonably) promised an early season start or, at least, a good season for 07/08.

To deny myself the joy I get from boarding might allow me to increase that money tenfold in 30 years, but it would also leave a huge hole in my life, denying me experiences, satisfaction and memories which will last forever.

Which, strangely, brings me full-circle to the maxim I used to use to justify burying my head in the sand over money – “Life’s about more than dollars and account balances.”

Although the maxim is the same, the application is different now – I know what my dollars are up to, and I have the tools and the beginnings of the knowledge to maximise that which I choose to save. But I also have passions to pursue, and no wish to turn into Ebeneezer Scrooge.

It’s a delicate balance, one which will require fine tuning for months and years to come. But it’s one I think I’ve settled into already.

The “Snowboarders at Timberline” photo on this post is from frozenchipmunk on Flickr.

This is the eighth part of a series on setting up a financial plan.
The beginning of the series is here.
The previous article is “Financial Tools: Net Worth Planner/Tracker“.
The next (final) article is “Finance: A Little Perspective (and some snow)“.

One final financial tool that I’m finding invaluable – a budget tracker.

One of the things I’ve realised over the last couple of months is that I’ve often spent money without really taking note of where it’s going. This was most apparent when I was trying to estimate my weekly expenditure for my Net Worth Planner. I knew pretty much what I spend, but I had no detailed idea of what on.

The only way to find out was to start detailing my spending down to the last cent, in a way which allows me to review it, and trim any unnecessary outlays. You could do this with a spreadsheet, but that quickly became cumbersome, so I turned to dedicated software for the task.

There are quite a few options out there – the venerable market leaders are Quicken and Microsoft Money (with the former garnering better reviews, on the whole). Since I’m almost wholly mac-based these days, I also tried out a couple of cheaper mac-specific options, Cha-Ching and iBank.

Cha-Ching was the first out of the gate since I picked it up insanely cheaply during their initial introductory offer. It’s a beautiful-looking app, and has some good features (adding “tags” to expenses is a good way to slice them, for example), but it was lacking in the area of tracking cash expenditures, didn’t have enough in the way of simplifications for recurring vendors/payments, and didn’t provide great overviews of expenditure over time. It was very nearly there, but not quite…

iBank, on the other hand, does exactly what I need it to. Managing account transfers is a breeze, the categorisation of expenses turns out to be just as useful (and in some ways simpler) than Cha-Ching’s tags, and the killer feature is the charting of expenses over time. Looking at this, I can see, for example, exactly how my food costs break down, by creating a pie-chart of the last month’s spending for all the relevant categories. In this way, it’s easy to see just how much I’m spending on eating lunch or breakfast out during the work-week, and motivate myself to bring food from home (or eat breakfast there) more often.

This isn’t a recommendation per se – different apps work for different people, but I prefer iBank.

For the first few weeks, I just tallied everything I spent, even cash expenditures (which go against a dedicated “Wallet” account entry). This in itself was a powerful motivator – it’s a lot harder to forget/forgive frivolous expenditure when you have to tally it all somewhere.

The real benefit, though, came a few weeks in as spending patterns started to emerge, recurring (but variable) bills turned up and I began to get a full overview of where my money was going.

The insight has allowed me to re-evaluate all sorts of spending, and has led to some direct changes:

• I changed my DSL and home phone service plans, cutting their monthly cost in half.
• I’ve started cooking batches of food and freezing the majority, taking them to work and saving $5-$10 on lunch each time.
• I was motivated to cancel the gym membership that just doesn’t fit into my lifestyle at present.
• I’ve switched banks, eliminating a bunch of annoying and unnecessary fees (and incidentally earning a much higher rate on my core savings).
• I’ve cancelled a wine club which, while nice, has left a stockpile of bottles which will take me 3-6 months to drink, minimum.

None of these things, in themselves, saves that much money per month, but it’s enough to notice, and over a year it will save me well over $1000. Not bad for 10 minutes each day updating my finance app…

The next step, now that I have over a month’s worth of data, is to build a reasonable budget for myself (which the app can do specifically), and see if I can pare it down further without living the lifestyle of an ascetic monk. We’ll see how that goes…

Disclaimer: I’m not a financial advisor, and I’m just sharing my own financial plans because, well, I like to share. It’s also a good exercise in “thinking out loud”. You choose to follow any advice in these posts at your own risk, though – I’m not responsible if you overdraw or suffer other financial calamity…

The iBank screenshot on this post is from IGG Software’s website.