This is just a data point, but I'll just say I disagree with your approach.
So let's look at the comment I replied to. He ignored your advice/approach and instead did things my way: as a result he moved from $30K salary to over $100K in five years.
That doesn't happen without considerable investment of time and energy.
Based on the fact that you are religiously inputting every transaction at point of sale, into a mobile app, and based on your being a HN reader, I will go ahead and make the prediction that you are able to earn within the top 10% of wage-earners in your city. My prediction is that instead of doing so, you are working equally hard to earn less than 50% of that amount. Go ahead and look up statistics and get back to me about whether I'm correct.
In other words, I am actively predicting that you are close to or even below the medium earner in your city, rather than in the top 10% as you have the ability to do so.
You don't have to tell me what city you are living in or what your earnings are, but I would appreciate if you told me whether I was correct.
By the way I can't visit your site, because your SSL cert is out of date and chrome won't let me visit it.
In the time you spent saving or stretching your rent, or inputing your groceries at the point of sale, you could have fixed that and been hired by someone who instead chose to pass on you since you can't even run your own web server.
It's a zero-sum game: either you are spending 30 seconds to a minute inputing expenses into your mobile app and using 'shoe leather' to walk around from store to store and evaluate your options so that you can shave a few pennies, or you are getting home a few minutes earlier and fixing your SSL cert and sending out another five resumes. It's one or the other.
I'd love to know whether my prediction about your wage is correct.
>The certificate expired on Tuesday, June 07, 2016 1:59 AM. The current time is Tuesday, July 19, 2016 5:50 PM.
Yeah, I need to get on the letsencrypt train and automate cert updates, but I don't have any pressing need. My site is pretty low traffic unless I'm actively sending out resumes (1-10 uniques/month). Most leads come from github/linkedin. A few minutes saved won't fix that however, I'll need a good weekend to get back into that mindset of server administration.
That said, I would gain as much time by parking closer to the entrance of the store as I would by not putting in transactions. It really is negligible time spent at this point. The largest time sink is the one night/month to reconcile all accounts and allocate for next month. The better I am at putting in my transactions at point of sale, the quicker that process goes too! In theory I still have 29 days a month to send out resumes.
Just to make this formal, my prediction about jfowles income was false. I made a wrong prediction.
You might still increase your income more than the time you spend saving money, though :) I was able to read your resume after adding an exception in Firefox, but I don't think employers would do that. It's a question of mentality, and I consider likely that you could increase your wage if you wanted to. But of course only you know that - for all I know you're exceptionally well-paid and kind of lucky to have scored your current wage at all. In my experience this is not commonly combined with tracking every expense.
But what do I know? John D. Rockefeller wrote every expense from when he was a teen through a billionaire. So who knows.
> You might still increase your income more than the time you spend saving money, though :)
Possible! It's more of a pesky human thing that I track my money anymore, having gone through a period where I was tiptoeing overdrawing my bank account every day. I feel much more comfortable (less stressed) about making moderate to large purchases knowing that every cent is already accounted for and previously allotted to those purchases.
As for my place in the wage distribution it is a freak circumstance of well paying job and low COL area. Not that I'm dissatisfied with the area (yet..), but it also makes it hard to justify moving for a 2x salary when housing will be 3-4x.
So let's look at the comment I replied to. He ignored your advice/approach and instead did things my way: as a result he moved from $30K salary to over $100K in five years.
That doesn't happen without considerable investment of time and energy.
Based on the fact that you are religiously inputting every transaction at point of sale, into a mobile app, and based on your being a HN reader, I will go ahead and make the prediction that you are able to earn within the top 10% of wage-earners in your city. My prediction is that instead of doing so, you are working equally hard to earn less than 50% of that amount. Go ahead and look up statistics and get back to me about whether I'm correct.
In other words, I am actively predicting that you are close to or even below the medium earner in your city, rather than in the top 10% as you have the ability to do so.
You don't have to tell me what city you are living in or what your earnings are, but I would appreciate if you told me whether I was correct.
By the way I can't visit your site, because your SSL cert is out of date and chrome won't let me visit it.
In the time you spent saving or stretching your rent, or inputing your groceries at the point of sale, you could have fixed that and been hired by someone who instead chose to pass on you since you can't even run your own web server.
It's a zero-sum game: either you are spending 30 seconds to a minute inputing expenses into your mobile app and using 'shoe leather' to walk around from store to store and evaluate your options so that you can shave a few pennies, or you are getting home a few minutes earlier and fixing your SSL cert and sending out another five resumes. It's one or the other.
I'd love to know whether my prediction about your wage is correct.
>The certificate expired on Tuesday, June 07, 2016 1:59 AM. The current time is Tuesday, July 19, 2016 5:50 PM.