Defence ministry presented loss as profit

Cyprus Mail reports:

AUDITOR General Chrystalla Yorkadji has highlighted high expenses, inconsistencies and disorganisation in the finances of the defence ministry and the National Guard in her 2010 annual report.
 
The National Guard officers’ club in Nicosia for example made a loss of about €537,000 despite claims of making a ‘profit’ of about €54,000, Yorkadji said in the report which was released on Tuesday.  

“That sum could hardly be called a ‘profit’ since the administrative expenses of the club, such as rent, wages, electricity, telephone and water were not calculated,” Yorkadji said.  Factoring those in, the club made a loss of over half a million euros, Yorkadji said adding that the bulk of it went to wages. 

And I thought I was bad with numbers …

The end of currency

TechChrunch has a nice post covering the developments and ideas in the area of digital money.  Even though most of the discussed is far from being practical today, the ideas and the progress are still fascinating.

Virtual currencies are in the news again with all the discussion aroundBitcoins, which is limited in supply and can be exchanged anonymously. Our own long experience with another digital currency, Ven, has made us think about the logical conclusion of these activities, and what it means for money at large.  And what it means is the end of money as we know it.

Question: Fuel vs. Internet

What do you spend more more on: your Internet connection bills or your car’s fuel?  Use monthly periods. How does that change if you consider all extras for your Internet connection (web hosting and other web services, extra services from your ISP, extra bandwidth utilization charges, etc) and extras for your car maintenance (oil, service, car wash, etc)?

(I came up with these questions while reviewing my spending statistics at Wesabe, which is an excellent service.  The basis for comparison of fuel to Internet connection lies in both of these being vital for many modern citizens, while they are currently mutually exclusive – you don’t use Internet while driving and you don’t use your car while using the Internet.  Not just yet.) 

Web-based personal finance managers

Over the last few years I’ve made several attempts at improving my personal finance management. With the exception of the last six month, I never tracked my spendings for more than a month or so. Two main reasons for that were:

  1. I never was on a financial edge for more than a month or so.
  2. I don’t enjoy accounting all that much and I never had a tool that made it anymore pleasurable.

Each of my finance tracking periods has been guided by a different tool. I tried a few approaches from plain text and spreadsheet files, through custom written scripts, to widely used applications. None of those worked for me, except for the last one I tried – GnuCash.

I use GnuCash for about six month now. It’s a really nice application, which implemented a few ideas right. But for me two things made it – documentation (especially 3 pages of Accounting 101 shipped with the software) and the wizard which asked a few simple questions and created some accounts for me to use. I started with the simple things, and somehow they worked. Then I tried a few more advanced ones (multi-currency, transaction splits, etc), and I still loved it.

I still love GnuCash. But I am starting to feel the need for a web-based tool. As good as GnuCash is, it has a number of pitfalls for me:

  • All data is on a single computer. I need to back it up myself. I can’t access it if my laptop is not with me.
  • My mostly used tool is Firefox browser, and I don’t see any reason why I shouldn’t use it for my accounting too.
  • Web-based services can offer additional goodies such as SMS/IM integration, email reminders, social aspects, and so on.

So, today I started looking for a replacement. My quest began at the LifeHacker post titled “Is Mint Realy For Your Money?” The article reviewed Mint.com service, while comments suggested a few alternative solutions.

Here are the services that I tried. Note – I haven’t spent much time with any one of them. Mostly those were brief sessions of register – create an account – create a few transactions – check the settings – logout.

Yodlee MoneyCenter – looks like something feature complete, but the interfaces are overly complicated and there is a certain degree of paranoia with logging in and out. While it looked like Yodlee was doing everything I needed all at once, the complexity of the interfaces and the general speed of the site made me go away without spending much time there.

Wesabe – got me impressed. Twice. Just a few minutes after I registered, I got an email from one of the co-founders – Marc Hedlund, welcoming me to the community. Marc caught my twit, followed to this blog, read a few recent entries (especially those about privacy concerns and Firefox extensions). His welcoming message provided a few extra pointers in the areas that I appeared to be interested in. Wow! I’ve seen a lot of services with personalized, fast responding support teams, but Wesabe guys (there is a blog and forum too) are a couple of levels above anything that I can remember.

The second impression on me was by Wesabe’s tagging system. Again, being a web addict I’ve seen plenty of sites and applications that use tagging. Wesabe did something really cool – they kept the simplicity of the concept while greatly extending the functionality. You can do anything with tags there. It’s very similar to the way Flickr uses tags for some internal stuff, but here tags are given to the user.

Regarding the functionality, Wesabe takes a more social approach to finance tracking and accounting. Most of the boring stuff is simplified and automated. Things which are used most often are implemented in the very straightforward way. And there is just enough of functionality to make it useful without cluttering the service interfaces and users minds.

There are a couple of limitations that prevent me from using this service right now though. None of the Cyprus banks support a straightforward export of data in any format that can be used to input accounts into Wesabe. So, I’m left with only cash-type accounts. And currently those cash-type accounts in Wesabe cannot track the account balance (no opening balance, reconciliation, etc). Marc mentioned that account balances will be added to cash accounts shortly, since many people requested them. Once this done, I’ll jump back to Wesabe with my bank statements. Really, really neat service.

ClearCheckBook.com – looked like I can work only with one currency at a time. That’s not acceptable. I use three at the moment – CYP, USD, and EUR. CYP with gradually disappear over the next few month, but I’m stuck with USD and EUR for some time to come.

Then I finally got to the service which started my quest today – Mint.com . Unfortunately, I wasn’t at all able to try it out, because it supports only United States banks and financial institutions. There was no way for me to avoid account import from one of those places where I don’t have an account.

So, as you can see from the above paragraphs, Wesabe is the one closest to my needs.  And compared to the other ones it is so much nicer that I’d rather wait for those features that I need rather than settle for something that I don’t enjoy half as much.

What other services are there?  Did I miss anything?

Buy Google stock

I agree with this part of the article:

While amidst recent market turmoil its stock is down 16% from its recent high of $747 to about $629 as of Thursday, I suspect that just means now is a good time to buy.

I disagree with the rest of it though…  For example, this here is some complete non-sense:

Google has a Microsoft-like lock-in