Sunday, October 12, 2008

Keeping track of things - Personal financial calendar

Keeping track of one's financial events always a good thing and my challenge has always been remembering dates - as a teen I couldn't remember a single girl's birthday and now as an adult, I cannot remember the maturity dates of my FMPs and my bond expiry dates. Given this, I decided to institute an universal distributed calendar on Google where I can have all key financial events entered in there. I picked google calendar since it allows for a centralized calendar, allows addition of tasks from remote software clients and also integrates with Outlook. So here is my setup and how I use it. YMMW.

  1. Mozilla Sunbird at home with remote google calendar configured at home
  2. Outlook calendar at work synced to google calendar one way (I dont want my work events to get into this calendar) using Google calendar sync
This setup allows me to have all personal events uploaded by me or the family into google calendar and they appear in my outlook and further google calendar can also send SMS messages as alerts to events prior to the actual date based on configuration. We are further able to use Mozilla sunbird as a good solid client on our home computer to be able to add events to the google calendar. So enough about technology - how do we use this setup you may ask. Well here is what my calendar contains today

  1. Repeated Events
    1. Credit card payment reminders
    2. School fees and other such stuff
    3. Reminders of events at school (I never said you have to use it only for finance !)
    4. Insurance payments
  2. One off Events
    1. FD maturity dates
    2. Other long term investment maturity
    3. Completion of any investment plans (STP/SIP etc.,)
    4. PPF event dates (5 years, 7 years etc.,)
    5. Other key events that you want to remember
This is a big relief off our minds as a family since all important actvities are being tracked by an external system and I get a sync up of the data on my outlook and my wife gets SMS alerts of events. The idea stems from GTD to get things out of our collective minds and have a system to track it.