This morning I met with Gloria

October 12 2009, 8:40am

I had a 30 minute meeting with my professor this morning to discuss the status of this project. I came into the meeting with my budget progress and conclusion that I need to increase my income or decrease my expenses. I mentioned that, to me, what would be most obvious is to focus on income generation, since no amount of expense tracking or data-widgetizing will help me until I can live within my means. Living within my means (meaning, subsisting on my monthly paycheck) is the only way I can begin to deal with debt, and living on my current paycheck would require moving or selling my car or getting rid of my phone or all of the above. The goal of this project is not necessarily to completely reinvent my lifestyle or prove how much I can do without. That can be a part of it, but what I want to focus on for now is revealing patterns and working towards increasing income or decreasing expenses. Gloria’s immediate feedback is that income from student loans IS income, and that I should be working under that assumption. Then my income vs. expenses are certainly more manageable. We scrolled through to my ‘Do I need widgets?‘ post, and her reaction is yes, absolutely. Because I need to be accountable for spending targets (such as are present on Wesabe). The question is: do I display a dollar amount or percentage amount on my site? What specifically do I ask for from a Mint or Wesabe API? Then we talked about the ‘making a product‘ post. I explained that it would be an effort towards income generation. Gloria mentioned an article I need to find, about craft community support through sharing techniques. She emphasized that what my own project does is explore techniques for financial lifestreaming. And that every time I get stuck and push through, I am collecting information that I can provide in a condensed format to make someone else’s life easier. Hence, I am already documenting the creation of a product: this financial lifestreaming infrastructure (slash Wordpress theme). Gloria went on to discuss Chris Anderson’s Free. She mentioned that he makes available an executive summary, or premier content, of the book for those without enough time to read the whole thing. And in the case of my project, perhaps what I am making available is a support group, or condensed advice. “Instead of paying a therapist or budget analyst to deal with your finances, come to this site for support.” Every time I get stuck, I have another opportunity to collect lessons to share. While I figure out the infrastructure to a financial lifestream, I am documenting the process in a way that can be repackaged as advice or executive summaries later on. If I have alpha testers of this theme, I would want them to document their own points of stickiness, thus generating their own package-able advice or executive summaries to share. The last thing we did during the meeting was discuss my work-in-progress manifesto. Gloria suggested a rearrangement of the financial lifestream steps, to something like:

If we can’t measure it, we can’t manage it. Discussing financial goals publicly creates an environment for personal accountability. Disclosing identifying financial information is a choice and never a requirement.

This week’s reading assignment: zenhabits.net. Note the “Start Here” page. I think many sites, including this one, can benefit from that sort of quick start guide.