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Sid Meier's Civilization Inspired Budget

alexrecker.com

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Re: Sid Meier's Civilization Inspired Budget

#3

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.

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.

Re: Sid Meier's Civilization Inspired Budget

#5
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.

Re: Sid Meier's Civilization Inspired Budget

#6

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 y…

Exactly. In a weird way, it feels a little more like physics - like you are tracking the position and momentum of a single rigid object while all kinds of things are trying to move it forwards and backwards.

Re: Sid Meier's Civilization Inspired Budget

#7
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.

Re: Sid Meier's Civilization Inspired Budget

#8
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. :)

Re: Sid Meier's Civilization Inspired Budget

#9
post #3

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.

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.

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!

Re: Sid Meier's Civilization Inspired Budget

#10
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.

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