Be your (Smart Money Clip) own CFO
Personal finance blogger Flexo became the "Chief Financial Officer of his own life" by treating his personal finances as if it were a business. In fact, once a month he publishes a financial statement on his web site to help himself stay accountable.
Putting together these reports each month like a business is the most important part of being the CFO of my life. As I export the numbers from Quicken (no longer Microsoft Money) into Excel to prepare the website post, I am forced to think about how much I spent, and where I could have saved more money without compromising the things that are important to me.
While publishing your income, taxes, and retirement savings out on the interwebs might not be for everyone (and if it is for you, do use an anonymous screenname), it is just another way to peer pressure yourself into achieving a goal. — Gina Trapani
Hack Attack: Time to budget 
by Adam Pash
I used to be terrible at living on a budget. It's not that I spent more money than I had, it was just that I never knew where my money had gone. It is disturbing to find that you've spent most of your paycheck without much to show for it. However, like many things, the cause of my bad budgeting was the lack of a good system, so it was time I sit down and figure out a system that worked for me.
Having recently perfected my budgeting system (all right, maybe it's not perfect, but it's getting there), I wanted to share it with the wonderful Lifehacker community at large. So get your adding machines out - it's time to budget.
Note to budget-wary readers: budgeting is a breeze as long as you've got a system, so fear not! It's not as bad as you think. Remember that a solid, organized, predictable budget can be a MAJOR stress-reliever, so read on!
Categorize your expenses
To get started, take a few minutes and write down all of your conceivable expenses in the course of a month. Whatever you spend money on, you want to capture it.
After you've gotten down most of your expenses, it's time to categorize. For the sake of simplicity, I try to group as many of my expenses together as possible. My expense categories include:
- Bills: Rent, insurance, cable... this one's pretty obvious. If you know exactly how much it'll cost from month to month (give or take a few dollars), you can consider it a bill.
- Household: All of my groceries, along with every small household-related purchase fall under household.
- Entertainment: I lump movies, dining out (really any non-grocery-related food purchases), concert tickets, and most of my remaining non-essential purchases into entertainment.
- Car: I don't love devoting a whole category to my car, but with insanely fluctuating gas prices, it's worthwhile to keep track of how much money you're feeding to Big Oil every month.
- Miscellany: Any totally unplanned expense that doesn't seem to fit any other category falls into miscellany (if you have a lot of miscellany expenses, you probably need to find a new category).
Now that you've got your categories, it's time to size up your budget.
Allotting your money
Bills are easy - you can calculate almost exactly what they will be from month to month, so start there. Add 'em up and set 'em aside.
Next, come up with reasonable estimates of what you'd like to budget for your other categories. Add all of your estimates together (including your bills) and you've got your budget for month one.
During the first couple of months with your new budget, you must track your expenses. This is VERY important. (I'll address tracking more next week.) Since you were just spitballing estimates for your non-bill expenses, it's important to keep track of every purchase you make so that you can get an idea of whether or not your estimates were reasonable.
If they were, congrats! If not, tweak your estimates to more realistic amounts. Remember, if you spend less than you had estimated, that's great - it's always going to feel good to mark down your total budget estimate.
On the other hand, if you're consistently going over budget, you might need to reexamine your budget and decide whether you need to be more disciplined or if your budget needs to grow.
Open a dedicated checking account
Once you've got your budget solidified, the last thing that you can do to keep yourself honest is open a checking account intended specifically to hold your monthly dispensation (a la Stackbacks). With a dedicated account, it's a lot easier to stick to your budget. When the money you've allocated for the month runs out, you're done, so pay attention. To be safe, I keep a $100 buffer in my account just in case I go over by a bit. If you don't spend all the money you've set aside - great! To make the process a no-brainer, I've set up automatic deposits to my account each month.
The best part about having a set amount of money budgeted each month is that it makes saving money and investing a breeze. All of your money not allocated to your monthly budget is ripe to be saved.
Track your purchases
In the end, the key to sticking to a budget is tracking what you spend. Next week I'll show you how I hacked Gina's AIM TodoBot to painlessly track all of my expenses.
In the meantime, I'd love to hear your system for sticking to a set budget, along with any suggestions on how you might improve mine, so give us your thoughts in the comments or fire an email to tips at lifehacker.com.
Adam Pash is an associate editor for Lifehacker who takes comfort in knowing where his money has gone. His special feature Hack Attack appears every Tuesday on Lifehacker. Subscribe to the Hack Attack RSS feed to get new installments in your newsreader. Title Tag or Headline - SEO for Humans? If you head over to SEOMoz.org you can check out their article on
Search Engine Ranking factors. You'll notice that the title tag is the highest rated factor [by an impressive panel of SEO gurus]. Based on my own experience this is probably a fact, although # of backlinks is certainly a biggie too.
But what is often overlooked in the title tag debate is not only is it the primary search engine ranking factor, but it is also the first impression of your site that a visitor gets from reading the search engine results page.
My point is that the right title tag, think of it as a headline, has two very big jobs.
- Get the search engine's attention and let it know what the primary topic of your page is.
- Get a visitor's attention and convince them that your site has the best chance of satisfying their need.
When I look at search engine results, it is often obvious to me that most sites have been optimized with only the first point in mind. My thinking is that with the right title tag my number 9 site can do as well as the number 4 or 5 site.
Here's a tool that I found that may help you out when you're trying to get a little human SEO into your story's title. It's called the
Emotional Marketing Value Headline Analyzer and it lets you enter in a headline and then it will give you some valuable information on how to create a connection with search engine readers using your headlines.
Here's the results based on this story's headline....If I wasn't so close to calling it a day, I'd work it up a few % points, but you get the idea:
This score indicates that your headline has a total of 25.00% Emotional Marketing Value (EMV) Words. To put that in perspective, the English language contains approximately 20% EMV words. And for comparison, most professional copywriters' headlines will score in the 30%-40% range, while the most gifted copywriters will score 50%-75% on headlines.
A perfect score would be 100%, but that is rare unless your headline is less than five words.
While the overall EMV score for your headline is 25.00%, your headline also has the following predominant emotion classification:
| Intellectual | Spiritual |
| We've determined that your headline appeals equally to people's spiritual and intellectual spheres. |
Happy headline / title tag writing.
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