Personal Finance, A Real Life RPG?

If saving and investing were like an RPG, Quicken would be the user interface. I’m not saying you must use Quicken to track your spending. I use some Excel spreadsheets outside of Quicken as well. When setting up Quicken for the first time I made a list of every place that my money is stored: checking, savings, paypal, investment account. I set all of these up as accounts and turned on automatic transaction downloading if the bank supported it. Next, I entered in all my credit card accounts. For my student loans and mortgage, I set them up as Liability accounts. This way I could watch them slowly go down over time. There are ways to set up loans in Quicken but it seemed too complicated. My way is simple but the downside is that it doesn’t add interest automatically. I wanted to get a rough estimate of my net worth so I entered in two asset accounts: my house and car. I entered their value as the amount they are selling for right now.

After I had all my accounts set up, I entered in my recurring bills and paychecks. There is a really cool Forecast graph in Quicken that will show your money go up or down in the future based on upcoming bills and deposits. If the graph is going down or staying even I need to adjust my flexible expenses budget.

So how is this like an RPG? In some RPGs deciding which gear to equip yourself with is a big part of the game. One piece of armor may boost one stat but reduce another. Once you have all of your income and expenses set up then you can analyze where to save money. I was able to save $10-15 by eliminating extra IP addresses I wasn’t using on my internet bill. If I spend more on groceries, I save more on eating out. At the end of the month you get to analyze your results and see if your worth went up or down.

This may not sound interesting to you in the slightest, but for someone who loves statistics like I do it can be fun. In my next article I’ll go through the only 2 reports I use and how my savings was going down without me realizing it.