Happy Birthday Maris!!

IMG_0417,
originally uploaded by vbha.

We had a blast at Maris' birthday yesterday.

The original plan was -

1. 5:30 PM Meeting at Seattle Centre for a Bonfire
2. 7:00 PM Get Dinner at Bamboo Gardens
3. 8:30 PM Hit the Ice rink at Seattle Centre
4. 10:30 PM Enjoy Piano Duet at Chopstix,
5. 12:00 PM play games at Marisa's place or do as the group pleases!

From 6pm to 2:30am - we had a tonne of folks. We started at 4 folks became 8 then 5 and eventually tailed off to Myself, Maris and Marisa!!

It was really really great time!!! We didnt catch much of Bonfire but the dinner at Bambo garden was pretty good, and at the ice rink we witnessed a new record in Maris from not knowing how to skate to be able to skate backwards!! And yep.. we were able to put her on spot when the pianist sang for her at Chopstix (but i was in more akward spot because he sang "Dick in the box" on my behalf...)!! From 6pm to until about 2:30am this was a blast......!!

Oh the preview pics are here - http://www.flickr.com/photos/vaibhavb/tags/marisbirthday. more pics are coming for her Camera as soon as she returns from Estonia....

Thanks to folks for making it a success...

HealthVault-MSN-Search

HealthVault-MSN-Search,
originally uploaded by vbha.

Budgeting to be Millionaire in Seven Years, Is it possbile?

I had blogged earlier about the personal finance tools available on internet. But after a long bout of finance management failure, I'm going to try and experiment by publicly doing my finances (of course some numbers are fuzzed but are close). I want to be able to get my net worth to a million dollars in seven years, is it possible?

With about $2000 of Cash flow every month what sort of rate of interest should i aim for ? So for this saving to become 1million i need a rate of return equivalent to 45%, as this calculation shows!!

So short question, can I achieve a consistent rate of of 45%? Is very unlikely! Which implies that i should increase by savings! This takes me to saving almost about 65K a year!!! Lets see!!

Next in this line of thought I want to see what my current rate of return is. I know its less than 1o%!! So point number one is something needs to be done about this poor investment strategy!

The bigger point and most import is budgeting! Is my money doing what i want to do? I'm I using money to buy things which will improve my quality of life? Or am i buying products or services which are improving my quality of life? Clearly i spend a lot on following items:

• Climbing gear - 2000$
• Camping gear - 1000$
• Cycling gear - 1000$
• Motorcycle - 1000$
• Eating out/ drinking - 3000$

However i dont spend enough on the following

• Travelling
• TV, Computer or other electronics
• New Car

So how should one divide the quadrants of quality of life so one can balance budgeting for better life versus being frugal to have more money to invest wisely!

Market Research!

I was wondering if there is more insight and suggestions wrt tools for Market Research.

I recall from the class the various tools one can use

• - Industry associations
• - Competitor websites
• - Public financial reports of competitors.

Particularly i wanted the ball mark data on quantities, customer segments and overhead cost which wine distributors reckon with. I couldn't get enough information from the industry associations or competitor's website and was wondering what else could i try. I need data to estimate the bulk and $$ required to sell wine to adistributor (typically the wine industries middle men).

Setting up a home office!

This weekend I was busy setting up a home office. The idea is to make use of my huge living room to share it as a office and living room. Just moving the book shelf from one side to next has given me a huge wall free. The next is to add a huge 8 ft by 4 ft white board on this wall! Eddie is helping me in this project. I have also added an exta desk in the room, i'm hoping to make the place comfortable for 4-5 folks to work. But Eddie's counterpoint is that we shoud buy nice desks and chairs so that we can make the place look cool!! Well lets see, where we go with this..

A simple facebook app - IOU

So today finally we released a simple version of the IOU facebook application, Eddie already has posted a review and comments on what need to improve in the application! The general idea is this little tool should be able to handle "I owe you" "You owe me" kinda scenarios between friends! Right now its just beer though!! :). Enjoy and drink cautiously....

Personal Finance!

Will we ever make a personal finance application which works seemlessly! I tried Quicken for a while and liked it but for some odd reason i switched to Money and man! its so often misconfigures my accounts, i can no longer reliably keep track of my accounts by using the auto-sync button. I have my old quicken and money files and i'm looking for something which will allow me to import them and yep! something which if i start using will still be usable 5 years down the line. I was looking to use some web 2.0 sites like Wesabe, Expensr which claim to have cool community support and very easy to use interface, but i hate the idea of downloading and uploading my bank account files all the time.

Well it happens that i can probably try Wesabe. It lets you schedule uploads if you use firefox. I should rather concentrate on tools to make up and realized financial goals rather than money accounting. Goals are the most crucial aspect of financial management. Well whats your money worth of, if you cant use it for anything@!

So what would be one's financial goals?

• Save 50% of Salary
• Build Equity of 50K
• Achieve rate of return of atleast 10% on Savings
• ??