Follow up posting: Calculating Your Net Worth – part 2.

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After my recent article on Calculating your Net Worth, I found that Consumerism Commentary is also addressing this issue in their posting How to Calculate Your Net Worth on Consumerism Commentary.

The one thing Flexo points out that I didn’t is:

Since the purpose of the calculation isn’t to compare yourself with others, it doesn’t matter what you choose to include as long as you’re consistent each month, and the numbers are meaningful to you.

It is this consistency over months and years that will help you to track your progress as I have done since 1997. Obviously, life changes, houses, cars, families, etc. all change too. So it’s likely that you will have to make adjustments as you go along. That is only realistic, but the changes should err on the conservative side of both assets (discount realistically) and liabilities (overestimate realistically).

 

For example, you purchase a new car and decide to list that as an asset AND a liability (for the loan). It may hurt you to know that since you drove that car home, its value has declined noticeably. You should value it at a price that is conservative, not new. You will need to value it consistently as depreciating over your years of ownership.

Another example would be: you buy a parking place as we did, obviously your assets increase, and so do your liabilities (with the increased mortgage); you may feel that you know what your house is now worth. Take a conservative guess, and deduct 10% of the value for good luck. Then look at the liabilities: your outstanding loan – you may not have a monthly or even a quarterly figure, so take a reasonable average then add a bit for safety. You don’t want any surprises on the downside! This kind of double calculation is more prone to errors, so do the math consistently and carefully!

I always try to be consistent in my valuations over the years, but as things change, I do update the valuations from time to time. Sometimes, though, I like to create imaginary spreadsheets so I plug numbers into my spreadsheet for fun to see what it could look like! But I try to control myself: that part is just a fantasy!

Tiptail and LunaTail: Double Blog Buzz with a little extra sprinkled on top!

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May’s promotion is almost over, and I’m working on the last three! You know, I’m kind of sad! This month’s promotion has been very successful for me, as I had the chance to discover 10 (woops! 11) great blogs! Each blog has unique features and each blog has taught me something different!

Cynthia recently emailed me to ask if she could ask to take part in May’s promotion. So here are jpegs of her two blogs:

The first is Tiptail: a blog which has changed focus to dogs, which is an important part of Cynthia’s life. In fact, the proceeds from this blog go to help Utah Collie Rescue. This quite appeals to me as I come from Scotland where Collies have traditionally been used as they are easy to train and make excellent dogs for herding sheep. In fact, our first pet at home was a collie/labrador cross, we called Patty! I’d love her to use a photogallery plugin to add pictures of her dogs in one gallery. That’d be a great touch!

tiptail

The second is Luna Tail: This blog took over from Tiptail as Cynthia’s personal blog, and it looks quite different. It uses the theme Palaam from Sadish who always has great themes! I’m using WP-Misty on this blog, but there are many wonderful themes, some of which are free, some of which are not. Cynthia covers a range of topics of personal interest: cooking, health, politics, personal issues, and, of course, dogs! I should forward this blog to my friend, Cindy, who loves dogs! Good idea!

lunatail

You’ll notice a couple of nice touches that she adds to the top of both blogs: her ‘Graffiti Wall’ that allows visitors to add any comments without necessarily responding to a particular posting. That’s a great touch!

So that’s Cynthia’s Double Blog Buzz. Hope you can visit her blogs! They’re something different!

TheOpenCD: making it easy to find the best opensource software

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There is so much opensource software available these days that you can pretty much find an equivalent product to something from Microsoft or another major software company. The problem is that it is difficult to find the software. Some of the databases and websites list hundreds, even thousands of projects. So how do you find opensource software without wading through those listings. Well, there are two websites that are quite useful in helping filter the software to the ‘best of..’ category.

The first is called TheOpenCD. This website lists half a dozen projects in major categories that you might find of value. In fact, that’s how I found Scribus (an alternate to MSPublisher) and Audacity (an alternate for Nero Editor). The other great website that lists popular options is perversely, PortableApps, but with the increasing interest in running applications on a USB device, this helps sort the wheat from the chaff for the uninitiated in opensource software. Both of these websites have complimentary but interesting suggestions.

Naturally, I’m increasingly suspicious of MS’s motives with online activation, increasing copyright protection, and rising prices! They are seeking to control much more of what we can do with their applications, and, ergo, MY data. I don’t like that. I don’t like that at all. I’m not against paying for software, indeed I have spent $1000’s over the years to amass a useless collection of CD roms and 5-inch disks; but MS is going way beyond what I feel comfortable with. So, I’m now using OpenOffice, Firefox, Thundbird, NVU,  BlogDesk, etc. wherever I can to avoid using MS software as much as possible. One day, I’ll throw out the OS, too. But babysteps!