Crap, A Whole Lotta Nothing fell in love:

* I tagged every gas station purchase with gas and auto. With a single click, I could see how much I spent just on gasoline each month and I could also see how much I spent overall on owning cars (by tagging all payments and repairs with auto).

* Among the dozens of gas fill-ups I had this year I noticed some were for roadtrips, so I could tack on a tag for that single trip (and add the tag: travel), then tag every other purchase from that trip with the city name. One click on the roadtrip city name and I could see how much that trip cost me, and I could also see how much travel in general cost me each month.

* I’ve taken to tagging any purchase that is a gift to myself, or an extravagance, or any non-necessary thing with: extra. In a click, I can see how much money I waste each month on silly gadgets, bike upgrades, and wacky t-shirts. There was never an easy way to get that kind of data from Quicken.

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I was recently in the hospital under heavy sedation (long story). Apparently the drugs made me extremely chatty and I began to explain to all of the doctors how I was building something that was going to change the world and then questioning them on how they managed their finances (the anesthesiologist used Excel). Even sober, I still believe that.

Most people go through life not knowing where their money goes, not knowing wether they’re getting good value from the people they give their money to, and too guilty to do anything about it. They say they’re too lazy to enter their spending in to a program like Quicken, blaming themselves when they should really be blaming Quicken for being such a crummy product. Meanwhile corporations are gathering more and more data on you so that they can come up with new and more sophisticated ways to part you from your money.

Wesabe thinks organizing your finances shouldn’t be a chore and that you should be keeping tabs on the people you give your money to so that you can find the good merchants and avoid the cheats. For the most part we’ve built something that does this. And we’re getting closer to those goals every day.

The rest of the company are Marc Hedlund and Jason Knight, founders, who write the Wesabe blog, Brad Greenlee and Coda Hale, rails gurus, and Jeff Fassnacht, designer.

I hope this explains why financial tips randomly started showing up on my blog.

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Starting with the Berkshire-Hathaway annual report/business lesson: 2004 Annual Report

Followed by this commentary on the report.

Mr. Buffet gives a lot of details about the workings of the business but he won’t add up the numbers for you and tell what the actual value is. That’s supposed to be your job. However, these guys put together a little calculator to do that dirty work for you. Naturally it says that Berkshire stock is heavily undervalued (despite outperforming the S&P500 by a factor of 2 over a 40 year period).

Naturally I went out and bought a share with my IRA contribution.

Here’s some more helpful links:
http://www.focusinvestor.com/links.htm

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