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Sid Meier's Civilization Inspired Budget

alexrecker.com

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Re: Sid Meier's Civilization Inspired Budget

#41

Post by ctrlaltdel121 »

Pyxl101 wrote: post #33

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 com…

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.

Re: Sid Meier's Civilization Inspired Budget

#42

Post by 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.

Re: Sid Meier's Civilization Inspired Budget

#43

Post by 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.

Re: Sid Meier's Civilization Inspired Budget

#44

Post by finance-geek »

Amorymeltzer wrote: post #20
Retric wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 inve…

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.

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

Essentially -- unrealized losses don't matter unless they are uncover-able losses.

Re: Sid Meier's Civilization Inspired Budget

#45

Post by zhte415 »

Pyxl101 wrote: post #33

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 com…

Historically? Perhaps batch processing.

It simply isn't possible for a bank for example, to press a button and see where the money is. It takes several days of operations to get anything near accurate and meaningful.

This sounds like a joke, but it most seriously isn't. (this is before the qualitative nature of valuing stuff, this is simply the question 'where is the money?')

Re: Sid Meier's Civilization Inspired Budget

#47

Post by PhasmaFelis »

lfowles wrote: post #40
PhasmaFelis wrote: post #39

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.

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

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.

Re: Sid Meier's Civilization Inspired Budget

#48

Post by nunodonato »

Pyxl101 wrote: post #33

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 com…

monthly bills and monthly paychecks...

Re: Sid Meier's Civilization Inspired Budget

#50

Post by 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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