Inzolo support importing transactions via Quicken (QIF) and Microsoft Money (OFX) formatted files. I generally recommend using OFX because OFX files have a unique ID associated with each transaction. This allows me to ignore re-importing transactions you have purposefully deleted.
What if you don’t want to ignore previously deleted transactions? Well, now you have that choice. I have added an option to the import transaction view that allows you to re-import previously deleted transactions.
I was listening to yesterday’s podcast of the Dave Ramsey show and Dave’s team asked on twitter for some Horror movies titles related to Dave Ramsey and the credit card industry. The responses he read were great. So here they are:
- Ramsey Scissorhands
- Tennessee Credit Card Massacre
- Debt Man Walking
- Fico The 13th
- Evil Debt
- Sixth Cents: I See Debt People
- I Know What You Charged Last Summer
- Bankruptcy The 13th
- The Last Foreclosed House On The Left
- Invasion Of The Money Snatchers
- Children Of The Card
- Debt Cemetery
- The O Men
- The Kids Think They’re Next
- Foreclosure On Elm Street
- Rosemary’s Baby Steps
- The American Expressorist
- The Night Of The Living Debt
Which one is your favorite?
I pay $12.50 every month for identity theft insurance. Some may say it is crazy, but I have my reasons:
- It makes my wife relax. Sometimes my wife can be overly paranoid. This is one item she worries about. For this fact alone it is worth paying $12.50 per month just to help her relax!
- I hate talking on the phone. I know know that if my identity was stolen, by law I would not be liable for any of the financial charges. That is not why I have the insurance. In the case that it is stolen (heaven forbid), I don’t have to spend the time cleaning up the mess. Someone with experience in that area will do it for me.
- Time is my most valuable asset. I have heard that it could take hundreds of hours of work to clear things up after an incident of identity theft. Honestly, I don’t know how long it does take, but whatever time it takes, it is definitely not where I would want to spend my time. I would rather spend it with my family and working, and my normal daily routines. I don’t want a thief to take that away from me.
- I’m not overly cautious. I surf the net a lot. I use my real name on the internet. I don’t shred every credit card offer that comes in my mailbox. I don’t like being paranoid. Having this insurance allows me to relax a bit too.
- It fits in the budget. Really it is only $12.50 to cover my family of 5. That’s $2.50 per person per month. We budget for it each month and it’s not a problem.
That’s about it. I know identity theft insurance is not for everyone. You are certainly fine without it. You can be caution about what you do and monitor your credit to prevent identity theft. You can spend the time to clear up your good name in the event of an incident. I just chose to let someone else handle that stuff for my family.
Now let me preface this by saying I am a huge fan of Dave Ramsey and I see the wisdom in all of his teachings. Now that said, I readily admit I don’t follow everything he says. One area in which I don’t follow along is with the cash envelope budget system.
I think the system is excellent. I do believe it “hurts” more to spend cash. It is hard for me to break a $20. I like that fact that when I spend cash I usually end up with change that becomes savings because I never spend change (I don’t know that Dave ever mentions that one, but it is a nice bonus).
My wife and I tried the cash envelope system. We gave up after only two months. Here are the reasons why:
- Inconvenience. Let’s face it, debit cards make life so much more convenient. It is not convenient to got to the bank or ATM once or twice a month to allocate cash in your envelopes. I hate waiting in line at the bank so I avoid it at all costs.
- Inconvenience. Yeah, same reason, but different. It is inconvenient to pay with cash. Grocery stores are not so bad really – unless you use the self-checkout, which I often do – again, because there is usually no lines there. Putting cash in those machines is downright painful. And really, who pays for gasoline with cash anymore?
- Location of the envelope. It’s happened on more than one occasion that my wife is making dinner and finds she is missing an ingredient. So what does she do? She calls me and asks that I pick it up on the way home from work. If I don’t have enough blow money in my wallet I reach for the debit card.
- Have you ever reached the checkout and when it is time to pay you realize you don’t have your wallet. That is really mortifying to me. I’m frantic in that case. I start looking through my car for a hidden $100 bill (it’s never there) or a blank check (never there either). Even if I only live 3 blocks away it is inconvenient and super embarrassing. If you forget your envelope and you don’t realize it before you get in line to checkout, are you really going to go home and get it? Not me, I’ll pull out the debit card again. Of course my intention is to go back to the bank and deposit the amount of cash I spent, but I don’t because that is so… inconvenient!
- While it “hurts” me to spend cash, it seems to have the opposite effect on my wife. If money talks, all it ever says to my wife is “goodbye”. I’m not being rude here. She readily admits this. It’s not more difficult for my dear wife to spend cash than it is to spend money in any other way. Basically, it is just more (there it is again) inconvenient.
Let’s face it. I love debit cards. What I like about them is that if you use your debit card as a debit card (as opposed to credit card) it withdraws the cash out of your account immediately. Your bank account balance is updated immediately (at least where I bank it is).
Here are some more things I love about my debit card:
- It is free to use. I have a free checking account. I don’t have to pay for new checks as long as I use my debit card.
- My bank let’s me customize it. I generally put pictures of my kids on it so people can tell me how cute they are. I sometimes wonder though if my bank would be opposed to me scanning in my drivers license so people don’t have to ask for it when I use my debit card in place of a credit card.
- It’s thin. With all that cash, your wallet can become a pain in the butt – literally.
- It doubles as a credit card. For those places that don’t accept debit cards but can take credit cards, my debit card works fine. I generally have to wait a day or two for the transaction to appear on my bank statement though.
- Did I mention it is convenient?
So, how do we make use of the timeless & effective envelope budget system with debit cards? We use Inzolo.
Whenever I get income, be it a paycheck or any other form of income, I decide where we are going to spend that money and allocate it to a virtual envelope.
Whenever we spend money using our debit card, the transaction imported lightning fast into Inzolo and I specify what envelope that money came out of. I can visually see all my envelope balances. If I go over in an envelope I can easily move the exact amount I need to cover the difference from another envelope.
It’s basically like haveing dozens of savings accounts set up in your bank and deciding where each transaction will come out of. I can even split transactions so that different portions come out of different envelopes.
So if you love the idea of the cash envelope system, but don’t feel you have the will power to stick to it, I urge you to give Inzolo a try.
I’m a visual person. I’ve added icons to default envelopes (the envelopes you can select when you sign up for the site). I have also added the ability to set envelope icons when you edit an envelope. Currently only the default icons are available, but look for more icon sets to be added soon!
Also, I’m in the process of building a forum that is pretty much ready. Point your browser to http://inzolo.com/forum to join.
I noticed a bug that when you enter a manual transaction and notice that you associated it with the wrong account, then edit that transaction the account balances in each account were not being reflected. I’ve fixed this issue.
Also, I made it possible to enter the allocation screen even if your unallocated income box is zero. My initial thoughts were if you had no money to allocate then you would have no reason to go there, but the allocation screen has become useful for more than just allocating income. You can use it to quickly modify goal amounts, see how much you’ve funded for a given month compared to your goal and update allocation plans.
As an example, I have a Jungle Disk account. I love it. I pay a small monthly fee and I have a reliable online back-up system plus access to all my files from any of my 5 computers with various operating systems. Slowly the monthly cost goes up depending on how much storage I use. So I wanted to modify my monthly goal and my allocation plan. Rather than waiting for my next income to update it, I can be pro-active and make the changes as soon as I notice them.
I’ve made a number of bug fixes and updates, but the most notable I’ll mention is the ability to allocate a percentage of your available allocation money. By entered a number followed by the percent sign (%), it will calculate the percentage automatically.
Here’s a short video of the update in action:
http://screencast.com/t/mRaQMFxN
I have had a few reports of people not being able to connect to their bank via OFX. It was difficult to diagnose because I have two different banks that are working fine. But I did manage to tweak a few items that I hope will resolve issues for other banks. If you know your bank supports OFX and have had problems connecting to it with Inzolo, please try again. At the very least you may get a more informative error message if you still can’t connect.
I’ve been thinking about the pricing model. My wife said $7.23 per month is a stupid price. Yeah, OK, it was a pie in the sky type of number (7 was my high school football and baseball number, 23 was my basketball number). So I decided to get real and make a better pricing model.
So, the new monthly cost is $4.95 per month. I know you could easily spend that eating out at lunch one day so it should be quite manageable.
There is a new option now as well. You may sign up for a yearly subscription for $34.95 per month. I’m sure you can create an envelope to drop in $2.92 per month. For me, that is only $1.46 per paycheck. I’m a cheapskate and I would definitely pay that price. I was putting away $13.20 per month to pay for another envelope budgeting system for 3 years, that’s a big reason why I wrote my own tool in the first place.
So I hope you like the new pricing model. I’m always open to feedback so feel free to drop me a line!
I’ve added bank account balances and totals (if there is more than one account) below envelope totals. This well help you get an idea if everything is synced correctly. Once you have assigned all unassigned transactions, your envelopes & unallocated income total (labeled "Account Total") should match your bank accounts total.
Note that bank balances are a new feature as of yesterday, so for those with existing accounts, if you have done anything at all I can almost guarantee your bank account balances will not be right. You will need to manually set your current balance. To do this, get the current balance from you bank and edit your bank account by doing the following:
- Click the Bank Accounts button.
- Click the edit icon on a bank account to edit.
- Enter your current balance and click Save.
Quick Update!
Rather than write another blog post I’ll just add to this one. I’ve added an Unassigned total to get a better picture of whether your transactions and envelope balances match your bank accounts. See the screenshot:
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