misskatiemo

I recently computed my net worth, and while increasing for the 5th month in a row, it's still very negative.

This is due to 2 student loans, a car loan, and a credit card. (Perhaps a bit TMI, but the credit card will be gone in Feb, the car loan MAY be gone depending on how much of a settlement I get for a crash I was recently involved in, and the student loans are sticking around for awhile, while providing me with a nice tax break and refund every year).

I'm one to set goals and check my progress on a regular basis (in my case, monthly after all my bills have been paid and before my next paycheck hits). Seeing progress every month helps keep me motivated, but focusing on the payoff date helps even more, especially when the progress is good, but the number is still "bad".

So - in a topic that relates to everyone, how do YOU keep motivated? Whether it be monitoring your investment accounts, putting away for a down payment on a house, paying off outstanding debt, or other money matters. What are your tools and what is your motivation?

My motivation? Paying off my credit card, car, and at least one student loan so that I can move to England (perhaps forever) under the Highly Skilled Migrant Programme.

topdown04

I use Quicken and find it invaluable, I'm sure Microsoft Money is the same. It's easy to see what I've accumulated as well as what I'm spending money on. And with the online updates, it's relatively easy to stay on top of CC, checking and investement accounts.

As far as motivation, I like accumulating wealth more than I like accumulating stuff. And being able to see the chart going up and to the right (mostly) gets me excited.

I also heavily take advantage of automatic withholdings from my paycheck. I've contributed 15% of my paycheck to 401k since day 1 and I've never missed the money, since I never had it in my checking account.

magician

How valuable would you find a portfolio analysis tool that's integrated with Quicken?

AZDavid

Magician are you one of the creators of Portfolio Optimizer Pro?

magician

Yup.

I wrote about 95% of it; my associate wrote all of the techno-computer stuff.

AZDavid

Very nice program! After learning the calculations behind the analysis this program saves a TON of time. I want to purchase a license but do not like the monthy fee aspect of the pricing.

topdown04

Sounds interesting. Does Quicken allow 3rd party addons? Or are you dumping the quicken account data to a file and analyzing it?

magician

My associate has written add-ons for Quicken; apparently they have a developers tool kit to make it easy to create add-ons.

I'm not sure how we'd implement it yet; it's just an idea at the moment.

sahtt

Until I can take a flight to anywhere in the world and race on any track in the world with any car in the world short of the super-exotic class and not worry about the $ side at all, I'll keep doing what it takes.

It's not "having" the money, it's having enough money so that I can do the things I want to do without blinking. Without concerning myself with the fact it can be invested for futher gains. To me there are only excuses as to why the above cannot be accomplished, no good reasons.

That and I've been poor before. I've done manual labor for 60+ hours a week when I was younger. Not going back.

magician

I'm sorry to hear that. We figured that most people would only use it once or twice a year to rebalance their portfolios, so a usage-based price structure seemed reasonable. We could have alternative pricing structures - one-time fee vs. usage-based - but that might complicate things too much. I'd like to hear your suggestions, but off-line (lest this thread get locked for being "commercial".)