Category: how to

I’m trying to build my audience, so if you like this post, please share it on social media using the buttons right above.

Last week I told you how I try to instill strong financial habits in my two cubs.  Obviously this is a sensitive issue because, sadly in my opinion, openly discussing money, especially with the little ones, is a bit taboo in our society.

That said, I think, early and open discussions on money are important.  As you know, financial literacy rates in our country are abysmal.  I truly believe that “early intervention” is tremendously helpful here.

Once you teach your cubs about earning and saving money, I think then the next thing is to teach them how to invest.

Investing

I am a super nerd when it comes to investing and personal finance (as you’ve probably figured out based on this blog).  So I am more than happy to dive in to deep topics like tax optimization and asset allocation.  But I can think of no quicker way to get the cubs’ eyes to glaze over and lose all interest.

For me, the hook to get them interested about investing is to sell it as a way to “get rich”.  Most cubs like the idea of being rich, so this fits nicely.  While keeping things age appropriate, I do tell them that our family’s net worth was a lot of hard work and savings, but then it grew several times that size because we invested it.  Putting it that way seemed to pique their interests.

As far as telling them what stocks are, I try to keep it as simple as possible.  A share of stock gives to a part of the company—if the company does well the stock goes up, and if it does poorly the stock goes down.  That’s it.  I don’t talk about bonds or dividends or anything else. 

Buying actual stocks

Once I got the cubs excited about stocks, I opened up two brokerage accounts with Vanguard.  First, all our family’s money is with Vanguard so that was the natural place to start.  Second, and this is important, Vanguard offers free stock trades.  As you’ll see in a second, frequent trades are important to keep the kids excited and engaged, so it’s nice that you don’t have to pay $15 each time you go in and out.

Since my cubs are minors, the account is actually in my name (to set it up for a kid is a monumental hassle).  Once they were opened, I funded each with $1000.  And we were ready to go.

I asked the cubs the simple question, “What stock would you like to buy?”  They wondered what their options were, and that’s where it became really cool—all sorts of companies have stocks.  We walked around the house looking at stuff we have that they like, and most of those were made by companies with stocks.

Mini Fox’s first investment was in Duke Energy since they’re our electric company, and ‘Lil Fox’s first was Edwards Lifesciences since I had done some consulting work there.  I bought $1000 worth of each stock and they were stockowners.

I tried to follow up by having them fill out a worksheet on each company so they could learn about it—the name, the headquarters location, what they make, how much revenue they get each year.  This worked at first, especially because we started in the summer, and they needed stuff to do, but I got lazy and they stopped doing it.  But I definitely think something like this is a good idea.

After a couple weeks I would ask them what the next stock they wanted was.  Obviously, in the real world I would never invest like this—individual stocks and very short time horizons.  But this really isn’t investing as much as it is education.

We’d go around the house again and pick another stock.  We’ve had Disney, DuPont (Mini Fox was obsessed with chemistry for a while), Vail (since Dad goes skiing every winter), and a bunch of others.  Right now Mini Fox is in Facebook because they own Oculus Quest 2 which he loves, and ‘Lil Fox is in Hasbro.

Celebrate the wins

A key to keep the kids engaged is to show them how they’re doing.  Obviously it’s more fun for them if the market is going up (dollar cost averaging is not a concept to teach right now 😊).  Fortunately, since we started this last summer, the stock market has been on a tear, up about 40%, so there have been a lot of wins.

Every few days I show the cubs what their stock is at.  Ironically, they don’t seem nearly as interested in how their stock is doing as much as “Did mine do better than my brother’s?”

Early on, ‘Lil Fox was rivaling Buffet.  He picked Valvoline (we got our oil changed there), Exxon (where we get gas), Toyota (I drive a 4Runner), and Pulte Homes (they built our house) all did tremendously well.  I’d call him a stock picking genius, and he had a lot of fun telling his friends that.

Mini Fox didn’t do as well (he invested in Tesla early but missed their huge run up) but made some good picks with Catepillar, Microsoft, and DuPont. 

As of today, ‘Lil Fox is up on his brother, but they’re pretty much in line with the market.  That said, it’s a few hundred dollars in profit, and that gets them really excited, and that’s kind of the whole point.

Who knows if this is a good approach or not, but I think it’s important that the cubs dip their toes in.  This is how we do it.  What do you do?

I’m trying to build my audience, so if you like this post, please share it on social media using the buttons right above.

Wow!!!  We’re going for the throat on this one.  Teaching kids about money is one of the hardest and most complex and most controversial and most personal of tasks facing parents and society at large.  But that’s never stopped us before.  Let’s take this topic on and see how many readers I can piss off.

As a kid I remember home economics class.  This was in the early 1990s and the shadow of “this is really a class for girls” still loomed, although that was definitely changing.  Reflecting on it now, that was probably the most important class I ever took in school and I blew it off.  Skills like how to prepare a healthy meal, balance a checkbook, plan a large purchase, do a load of laundry—those are important.  Want to know what knowledge I haven’t really used a lot as an adult: trigonometry (and I’m a huge math nerd), the generals of the Civil War, how to diagram a sentence, which colors complement a blue background for an art project.

The point is, the most important life skills aren’t taught very well in school these days.  That’s a topic with a lot of deep water and could consume hundreds of blog posts.  But in the here and now, we reynards and vixens (did you know that’s what adult male and female foxes are called?) need to teach the cubs about money and managing their finances.

I will be the first to admit that I’m not perfect at this.  I am constantly learning and tweaking what I do, but here are a couple ways I try to pass these lessons on to ‘Lil Fox and Mini Fox.  If you think my approaches are good ones, feel free to steal them; if you think they suck, feel free to give me some pointers.

Allowance

For cubs as old as ours are, the allowance is the central element of the cub economy.  I pay each cub one dollar per work day (weekends not included).  This is payment for all school related work which Foxy Lady and I purposely call their jobs (“You know how Dad and Mom have jobs that make money?  Well, school is your job.”).

Additionally, the allowance pays for chores that they need to do.  We’ve been working on expanding this list, but admittedly we aren’t great about that.  Some times it’s easier to do it ourselves than work with a 7- or 10-year-old to get it done.  That said, taking in the dumpsters after trash day, taking dishes to the sink, cleaning their rooms, and putting away their backpacks and shoes are their main chores.

Every Friday is payday and I give each cub $5 for the week of work.  I go to the bank every couple of months and withdraw $100, all in singles.  Each cub gets five one-dollar bills.  This was purposeful because I think getting a bunch of bills has a bigger impact than just getting a five-dollar-bill.  Maybe I’m right on this, or maybe I’m wrong.

Spending it

I feel I am probably over-paying for the allowance, but then I am pretty mean when it comes to what the cubs need to buy, so I figure that balances things out.

With their money they have to buy: Slurpees, any toys that are not birthday or Christmas gifts, gifts for their friends if they are invited to birthday parties, their season passes to Carowinds, and any video games.

It’s funny when we go out and I stop at a gas station to get a soda.  Mini Fox ALWAYS asks if he can get a Slurpee.  When I tell him he has to pay for it, he really thinks about it.  Sometimes he says “yes” and other times “no”.  That’s really the whole thing I want to accomplish.  If they can understand that if they want something it costs money, and that money comes from their hard work, then I think I’m winning. 

Also, we’ve had a lot of conversations at Wal-Mart about something they want to buy but they don’t have the money.  This leads to good conversations about them saving, and how long it would take (If it costs $22 and you have $8, how much more do you need?  If you get $5 each week, how long will it take?).  Also, the two of them can strategize about pooling their money, but then they have to share it and only pick something they both want.  That seems like parenting wins there.

Saving it

Obviously the other big concept is saving.  For us this is equal parts conceptual and physical.  Conceptually, we talk about those things above—if you want something you need to save to get it.

Physically, we talk about where the cash goes.  Remember, they are getting five one-dollar-bills each week, so it adds up.  I bought them little plastic storage units for screws and nails and things like that from Lowes.  They keep their money in those, and we call it their banks.  When we go out they need to carry their banks with them in case they want to buy something.

I also set up bank accounts for them.  Most banks allow something for kids which waives all the low balance fees.  That’s what we did at Bank of America.

For the bank, that’s a bit of a ritual where I take them and make sure they handle the transaction.  They have to take the cash out of their bank, count it, and give it to the teller.  When they’re done, they ask for a receipt with the balance on it.  It’s important to me that they physically handle everything so they understand it all.

Generally, they hate going to the bank because that means they “don’t have their money anymore for toys at Wal-Mart”.  That’s a bit of a miss and a concept we’re working on. 

I also try to stress that banks keep their money safe.  This became real for Mini Fox who lost his bank with about $70 in it.  He was sloppy with it and not paying attention and lost it.  Yikes!!!

I have a feeling I know where it is, but I’m content to let him painfully stew on this one for a while.  Hopefully he’ll remember this feeling and see the value of protecting him money at a bank.

Dang.  This one is already at a thousand words.   Why don’t we split this into two posts and later in the week we’ll talk about how I have introduced stocks to the cubs.

See you then.

I’m trying to build my audience, so if you like this post, please share it on social media using the buttons right above.

Sometimes it’s easy to think the way to amass wealth is with grand slams or 80-year touchdown passes (or what ever analogy you want to use for that big move).  In financial terms it’s getting a $500k job or picking the next stock that will double in a month.  But I think the opposite.  Those big wins are rare and people can waste a lot of time and effort and money chasing them.

Rather, the best way to amass wealth is the little wins (the single hit or the 4-yard run up the middle).  In personal finance those “little wins” are things like we talk about here a lot: lowering your costs, saving small amounts every paycheck, making sure you get the 401k match.

Recently, the Fox family got another small win which will add up to something very large.  We are in the process of refinancing our mortgage.  It’ll save us a little bit each month but that will add up to an enormous amount when it’s all said and done.

Two years ago, the Fox family moved to Charlotte.  We bought a wonderful home, and like most people, used a mortgage to pay for it.  Also, as with most people, our monthly mortgage payment is our single largest expense.

Over the past two decades, interest rates have been at all-time lows, and that means that mortgage rates have similarly been at all-time lows.  When I first purchased a home in 2006 my mortgage interest rate was 6% and everyone was talking about how incredibly low rates were.  Fast forward 15 years and rates have been cut in half (or even lower).

To the point, we are in the process of refinancing as we speak, at this very moment.

When to refinance

The decision to refinance really comes down to a decision of taking on a little pain now (in terms of closing costs and other fees associated with the new loan) for a lot of benefit later (in terms of lower interest rates).

For us we had the following stats for our current mortgage:

Mortgage amount	$800,000
Interest rate	3.65%
Years	30
Monthly payment	$3,781

The simple math tells you that we’re paying about $30,000 a year in interest, or about $2,400 each month.  That seems like a really big number.  Even decreasing that a little bit could really move the needle.

Doing some back-of-the-envelope math, knowing rates were around 3%ish, I could save about $5,000 a year or about $400 a month.  Definitely that seemed worth it, at least to start the process.

I filled out a loan application on line and got bombarded by a ton of people offering mortgages.  After sorting through all the messages and picking the one or two that seemed best, I went through a process that all-in took about 10 hours of work plus sending a bunch of emails.

Ultimately, we got a 3% rate for closing costs of about $6,000.  This is taking candy from a baby.  It’s hard to imagine finding a better deal.  I’ll be charged $6,000 today (and I won’t even really pay it because it will be rolled into my new mortgage), for the ability to save $5,000 this year and every year after.  Easy money.

Going with a shorter mortgage?

We will be refinancing with another 30-year mortgage.  We could have gone with a 15-year mortgage and that would have knocked our rate down to about 2.88%.  Certainly, a lower rate is good, about $80 per month in savings.  However, it requires a larger monthly payment.  We could afford it, but I definitely think we can do better by investing that money.

In fact, that’s the same playbook I used to get my car for free.

So we went with a 30 year mortgage.

Going with an ARM?

The other option we had was to do an adjustable rate mortgage.  The way these work is they give you a really low rate for five years (hence a 5-year ARM), but after that the rate can adjust, almost always up.

We have used these in the past, both in Los Angeles and Greensboro, and it turned out both times that was the right decision.  ARMs make sense if you think interest rates will stay low, or you think you’ll move before the ARM is up.  For us, in the past, we moved before the ARM was up, so taking the lower rate worked.

Now, we are pretty well settled in our home so we don’t plan on moving until Mini Fox graduates high school (10 years away).  Also, it seems very unlikely that rates will stay this low.  Most people, me included, expect rates to go up.  For all those reasons, we didn’t do an ARM.

That left a traditional 30-year fixed mortgage, and that’s what we went with.

To pay points or not?

The final decision was whether we should take the normal rate or “pay points” to get a lower rate.  What this means is we could take the 3% rate and pay the normal closing costs ($6,000).  Or we could pay extra closing costs (about $7,000 extra, making the total closing costs $13,000) and get a rate all the way down to 2.65%.

This may seem more complex but it’s still a fairly straight-forward calculation.  Just doing the regular refinance would reduce our monthly costs about $400 per month, so we’d “pay off” our closing costs in a bit over a year.  No brainer.

By paying the extra points, we lowered our rate an additional 0.38% or about $150 each month.  Of course that cost us $7,000, so it would take us about 46 months to “pay off” the extra points for the lower rate.

Four years may seem like a long time, but then you remember that it’s a 30-year mortgage, and it doesn’t seem that long.  Even if we sell in 10 years, we’re still well ahead of the game.

That’s our story.  We’re going with a 30-year mortgage with closing costs of about $13,000 but that will lower our monthly payment about $600.  Like I said, taking candy from a baby.

And if you really want to nerd out, if I assume that I can invest that $600 each month in the stock market at historic averages, after the 30 year mortgage is done, I’ll have a tidy $730,000!!!  That’s almost as much as the mortgage itself.  Not bad.

I’m trying to build my audience, so if you like this post, please share it on social media using the buttons right above.

Saving for college is a major issue when it comes to personal finance.  When I talk to people, it’s nearly universal that people say their financial goals are to “have enough to retire comfortably” and to “pay for their kids’ college so they don’t come out with loans.”

If that is your goal, that begs the question: How much should you be saving each month?

Obviously this is a very complicated question.  This is not a one-size-fits-all situation since there are so many details that make can make things vary substantially.  Probably the biggest one is how much the total cost of attendance will be for your kid’s particular institution.  That said, we can look at some broad averages.

The type of school

As you know, I actively question the value that colleges deliver in this day and age.  When I look at the costs of attendance, that just reinforces the idea that colleges are WAY OVERPRICED.  That said, let’s assume we have two broad choices for college:

In-state:  Parents will get a huge break if their kids go to a public in-state school.  The “top” state school in each state tends to cost about $25k for total attendance.  Certainly there’s a range—UCLA is about $34,000 while University of Massachusetts is about $19,000.  However, don’t think those lower costs are charity.  Your tax dollars are subsidizing those lower costs.

The cost of University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, in our home state, is about $24,000.  Also, that’s a number that easy to work with since it’s divisible by 12, so let’s go with that.  We’ll assume that in-state expenses at a good school are about $24,000.

Private/out-of-state:  If you don’t take advantage of that in-state subsidy, costs get higher very quickly.  Private schools can range from about $25,000 to as high as $70,000.  Since most of the schools that you think of when you think of private colleges—Harvard, Duke, Notre Dame, etc.—are in that $70,000 range, let’s use that as our number.

How much to save

Maybe time got away from you and you are getting a really late start.  Your child is entering college this year.  The math here is pretty easy.  Each month you’ll have to come up with 1/12 of the annual cost of college.  For a public school, that’s $2000 per month and for a private school that’s about $5800 per month.

Those are big numbers, but the good news is if you plan for it and are able to save sooner, those monthly contributions become a lot more manageable.

If we look at the other extreme, we can calculate what would happen if you started saving when the child was born.  This is a bit more complicated because there are two powerful factors at play. 

First, tuition costs for college are always rising (I’ll spare you my rant, but suffice it to say it’s ridiculous).  Let’s assume that on average college costs increase about 3% each year.  That means that $24,000 annual cost for a state school this year will be compounded 18 years by the time your child enters college.  That’s a big deal, increasing the cost from $24,000 to about $43,000.  Ouch!!!

Time doesn’t help us there, but it does help us in the way you probably expected.  Second, the money we save each year can be invested.  If we assume a 6% return, that becomes really powerful, as we all know.

The calculations aren’t easy and I do them on a spreadsheet.  At the end of the day, you’d need to save and invest $350 each month to pay for a child’s 4 year public college education.  If you go private, that number increases to a bit over $1000 each month.

Of course, real life probably puts most of us in the middle between those two extremes—starting when the kid is born and starting when the kid starts college.  This makes sense.  When the kid is born there are a lot of expenses and other things going on, so it’s not always easy to start right away.

Here is a table that shows how much you’d need to start saving each month based on the year you start.

Kid’s age you start saving	Public	Private
0	$351	$1,024
5	$460	$1,343
10	$650	$1,896
15	$1,070	$3,119
18	$2,000	$5,833

I don’t know if that chart fills you with optimism or pessimism.  Obviously the sooner you start the less you have to save.  I was a bit surprised by how much just a few extra years helps.  If you started saving when your kid is 15, you have to save about half of what you’d need to if you started when they enrolled.  That just shows that it’s never too late to start.

On the other side, if it takes you a few years to get everything lined up, and you don’t start saving until the child is 5 years old, you don’t have to come up with a lot more than if you started when the kid was born.  So that means you shouldn’t beat yourself up too much if you had to wait a bit.

Either way, if you decide that college is right for you child and that you want to help them pay for it, I hope this helps put those financial requirements into perspective.

I’m trying to build my audience, so if you like this post, please share it on social media using the buttons right above.

“You can’t hit what you can’t see”  –Walter Johnson, major league pitcher from 1910s

As you take more control of your personal finances, there will come a time when you need to start tracking it somehow.  Maybe you’ll be hyper-obsessive like I am and look at it multiple times a day (which objectively is stupid since the numbers don’t change that fast, but I do it anyway).  Or maybe you’ll want to see what things look like every week or every month to make sure you are on track.  Either way, you’ll need some way to track your finances.

There are two major options: a program you purchase and install on your computer like Quicken, or an internet website that consolidates your online accounts like Mint.  For the longest time I was a Quicken devotee (and before that I used Microsoft Money), and then I recently switched to Mint.  This post is going to be looking at the pros and cons of each, Dr Jack-style, to help you pick the one that will work best for you.

TRACKING SPENDING:  Both do this fairly well.  You can download your bank and credit card activity, and both do a somewhat decent job classifying the expenses into the different categories.  I think this is a bit of “the price of admission” that you should absolutely expect.

There is one feature that I really liked about Quicken that I don’t get with Mint—the ability to split expenses.  When I go to Costco and spend $300, I can only use a single category in Mint, so I use “groceries”.  However, in real life, that $300 was split into $150 for groceries, $30 for pet food, $70 for Foxy Lady’s contacts, and $50 for some pool toys for Lil’ and Mini.  In Quicken I can split that $300 expense into those different categories which is really nice when you want to compare your spending to your budget.

[EDITOR’S NOTE:  After posting this, a reader named Ashleigh mentioned that you could indeed split transactions in Mint.  It took some tinkering around but I figured out how to do it.  She was indeed correct.  That said, I must say that it’s not the most user-friendly or intuitive process.  But hey, it’s free so I can’t complain, even though I just did.]

Advantage: Slight edge to Quicken

PROJECTING FUTURE SPENDING:  This is a really nice feature in Quicken that you don’t have in Mint.  When you look at the cash flow of your checking account, it’s nice to look into the future to make sure that your balance doesn’t fall below a certain level.  So you might get a paycheck or two, but then you’ll have your mortgage, a credit card payment, and a couple bills, all of which are hitting on different dates.  That’s a lot of moving parts.

If you’re like me and you try to keep your checking account’s balance fairly low, freeing up the extra money to invest where you can get a higher return, then you need to be a little more precise.  This is probably the single biggest feature that I miss by switching from Quicken to Mint.

Advantage:  Quicken

ACCURACY:  With Mint the website downloads your transactions and then does its thing.  Most of the time this works well but sometimes it doesn’t work and the results look goofy.  Look at the picture from Mint for one of my investments.  Notice how it thinks that I invested $321.69 and that has increased $26,747.  While I would like to think that I am that brilliant of an investor, I can assure you I’m not.  For some reason the download had a bug in it.  With Quicken, you can actually go into the file and manually change things to take care of stuff like that.

Advantage: Quicken

NON-BANK STUFF:  A lot of people have financial “stuff” going on that isn’t with your bank or brokerage account.  Sometimes it might be off-the-book loans like maybe your parents helped with the down payment on your house.  With us, I have stock options that aren’t in an account compatible with Mint, so I don’t have visibility to them.  With Mint, if you can’t download them they don’t exist.  Obviously that creates a bit of a problem if you want to take these into account.

With Quicken if you have stuff like that you can manually create accounts and transactions.  It’s not ideal and certainly not as easy as downloading them, but sometimes something is better than nothing.

Advantage: Quicken

ANALYSIS:  Quicken has a lot more robust offering of analyses that you can use, including a host of reports that you can customize to show whatever you want.  I used these to track how my spending was doing to my budget as well as a report that showed how my investments were doing.  Mint has some useful reports, but it isn’t anything near as robust as what Quicken has.

However, Quicken does have a bit of overkill.  There are all kinds of reports that it offered that I didn’t use, or even worse used and thought gave bad advice.  Quicken had a retirement projection tool that I played around with.  It said that at 65 I would have something like $5 million, but that I would run out of money by 90.  Ludicrous.  I didn’t use that tool after that.

Advantage: Quicken

CONNECTIVITY:  This is one of the areas where Mint really shines.  Its whole platform is based on smooth, seamless connectivity with all your accounts.  Everything is designed to make this easy—from initially linking your accounts to Mint, to updating them.  I love Mama and Papa Lynx (my in-laws) to death, but sometimes they aren’t the most technologically savvy.  They got everything up and running in Mint without any problems, so you know it’s pretty user-friendly.

This is the main reason that I don’t use Quicken anymore.  I kept having problems where my accounts wouldn’t update.  Sometimes it was my accounts would change (like when my Vanguard account got large enough to go to their Admiral shares), other times it would be a cookie or some other technical thing on my browser that I don’t really understand.  No matter, it would be a royal pain in the butt.  I’d have one of three options, none of which were good: I could spend time with their technical support, I could manually enter the transactions, or I could just not update (what I ended up doing).  We live in a technical age, so to have this not work really well is a problem.

Advantage:  Big advantage to Mint

TECHNICAL SUPPORT:  As you would expect with a free site on the internet, Mint doesn’t offer you a lot of help if things go wrong or you screw something up.  If you click on the “get help” link it sends you to a page that recommends you try to find the answer to your problem in their community.  So basically you’re hoping that you can find someone who had the same problem you did and wrote about it.  That’s kind of an “f-you”, isn’t it?  I’ve struggled a couple times and found my answers by googling for it, and it worked but it took a bit of effort.

Quicken on the other hand has a bonafide help center.  You can chat with a real person who will try to help you.  This is what I used when I had connectivity issues.  By and large, they’re pretty good and can solve most problems with a minimum of hassle (although it’s probably a minimum 30-minute time commitment).  Maybe I’m stuck in the past, but I do like it when I can talk (either over the phone or via chat) to a live person.

Advantage:  Quicken

INTEGRATION TO OTHER PRODUCTS:  Quicken allows you to upload your files to programs like Turbo Tax and also to spreadsheets if you really want to do some hardcore analysis.  But this is another feature that I think sounds really great, but when you really think about it, it might not be all that valuable.

Take the tax thing for instance.  I supposed you could download all your stock sales from Quicken into your tax program to calculate your capital gains, but who really does that?  Doesn’t everyone just take the form that Vanguard or Fidelity or whoever sends you and plug all those numbers into your taxes?  In all the years I used Quicken I never once used these features.

Advantage:  Irrelevant edge to Quicken

COST:  Mint is free, and that is awfully hard to beat.  Quicken on the other will set you back between $50 and $100.  Plus Quicken uses planned obsolescence where their product stops working after a while (it stops connecting to the internet to update your accounts), so you have to buy a new version every couple years.  Certainly a few hundred dollars over a decade isn’t going to change the world, but I’d rather have it in my pocket than in Intuit’s.

Advantage: Big advantage to Mint

So there you have it.  Looking at it, Quicken has more advantages than Mint, and that makes sense.  Quicken is a better, more powerful product, no question.  However, Mint has probably the two biggest advantages—its connectivity and it’s free.

I appreciate that I am a power user when it comes to these things, and even I find a lot of Quickens extra features overkill, and I just don’t end up using them.  That makes me give the verdict that Mint is probably the better choice for most of you out there.  But don’t shed a tear for Quicken and their parent company, Intuit.  It turns out that Intuit owns Mint as well.  So there’s a lesson in cannibalization.

What is your opinion on Mint or Quicken or any other system you use to track your finances?