A Civilization-Inspired Budget Gives You Instant Insight Into Your Spending Habits
Budgets tend to be boring, versatile, and incredibly difficult to stick to because they don’t scale with you. Blogger Alex Recker and his wife were looking for their own solution and turned to Civilization to find their answer.
The essence of the system of work on the assessment of daily expenses. He started by introducing fixed costs, breaking them down by day of the month, and then calculating the cost per day (a $ 8 Netflix subscription costs about 26 cents a day). Then he went in and created a system for semi-regular and irregular purchases. At the same time, the goal was to create a simple “step-by-step” system that was updated every day:
After all, it was safe to say that the amount in column C represents how much money I made that day . If it was negative, it means that I spent more money than I earn in a day. If the result is positive, then I saved.
I had more instant feedback here. Now I tracked how much I saved each day.
Starting with a spreadsheet, he moved the calculations to a web application that generates many different graphs. It also creates a more public version of the app if you’re interested . Check out his blog post to see how it all works.
Our New Sid Meier’s Budget Inspired by Civilization | Alex Recker via Hacker News