David Pitlyuk

I’m very finicky when it comes to managing my personal finances. I like to make sure all bills are paid on time, and I know where all of my money is and how much I have. This is going to be one of my more informative posts, so make sure to give it a read AND take action if you are trying to better manage your own financial situation.

Enter Microsoft Money. The software that keeps it all in check for me. For $30-$100 you will have the perfect solution for managing your finances. I’ve been using MS Money to track my finances since about 2000, which is great because I have a lot of historical data that I can pull from.

My first process is that I’ll normally keep any receipt that I get and put it in my wallet. I try and use my credit card for most purchases since I get 1.5-5% cash back rewards. After a week or two when my wallet has a decent amount of receipts, I’ll empty it out on my desk and start inputting them into MS Money. For any items which may be a write-off on taxes, I add “write off activetuning” or whatever business of mine it may apply to in the memo field. This just makes it easier for me at the end of the year when I’m giving all my information to my accountant.

At the end of each month when I get my statement for each account, I’ll go in and balance the account. This will ensure that I have all charges in the software, and of course it will ensure I don’t find any mistakes on the statement (I’ve found double charges, incorrect tips, etc before, so it’s always good to go line-by-line). I do this for each account, every month (savings, checking, credit cards, etc…you can even do your PayPal account). Each account doesn’t take very long to do, especially if you actively input your receipts through the month.

The best method I’ve found to do this is to go through the statement, and highlight the amount in each line once it has been cleared in MS Money. This way once you go through everything, you can just back to the stuff that hasn’t been highlighted and make sure they either need to be put in, or are mistakes. The most important reason for doing this is making sure that you never fall behind, and all of your numbers are accurate at least up to that month.

Alternatively, you can have MS Money connect to your financial institution and just download everything from the statement and put it into the software. I don’t like this method for a few reasons:

1. I don’t like the names of the items that are chosen.
2. They don’t choose the right categories that I want
3. I want to add memos many times
4. It’s hard to remember what they are for
5. You get lazy and don’t proactively update your own financials, therefore you lose touch with it.

Once you have data in there, it’s easy to just pull up the “accounts list” page and easily see where everything stands. On top of my regular accounts, I also track my investment accounts through MS Money. Investment accounts also show up in your accounts list, so you can easily track your net worth.

Another cool thing I use MS Money for is to track categories and run custom reports. When I set everything up for the first time, I went through every category that MS puts in by default. I added/deleted/modified everything as needed so I could have things specifically tailored to what I want. So now if I want to see how much my gas expenses have been over the past few years, I can see that I’m spending a lot more money than before (due to more driving and higher gas prices):

You can of course export the data to something like Excel if you want to create better charts.

The other thing I use MS Money for is to manage any sort of recurring deposits/bills. For example I know every month I’m going to have certain bills and a paycheck from various sources. I set these transactions up to either be automatic (for example I take a specific percentage out of every paycheck and put it into my ING savings account) or manually (ex: My electric bill varies from month to month). This gives me an idea of generally what I’m planning to spend/deposit, and I can better manage my finances knowing this information.

You can also use this to create a budget. Based on what you normally spend/make every month, you can budget a certain amount to specific categories, and MS Money will help you track this. For example if you only want to spend $200/month going out for food, you may find out mid-month you’ve used the amount you’ve allotted and you can tone it down for the rest of the month in order to maintain your budget. This is perfect for those of you that have a hard time realizing how much you are spending, and don’t want to end up with a massive credit card bill you weren’t expecting.

There’s much more, but this is pretty much what I use it for. Using my basic guidelines, you too can proactively manage your own finances and make sure you are in control.

Microsoft Money 2007 Deluxe Microsoft Money 2007 Deluxe brings all of your personal accounts - banking, credit, and investment - into one place and provides the tools you need to help you improve your credit and debt and tackle tax time with ease, so you can spend less time worrying about your money and more time enjoying it. Money 2007 Deluxe automatically consolidates your online accounts in one place.

I’ll be leaving for Ocean City, MD tomorrow for my annual “the guys only” vacation. This is a chance for our circle of good guy friends to just relax, drink, enjoy cars, enjoy the ocean, and no girlfriends are allowed. We always go the second week of June because of the OC Car & Truck Show. The weekend is always full of some amazing cars driving up and down the main street in Ocean City. My circle of friends are all into and have pretty nice/fast cars, and this year I’ll have a Viper, and I won’t have it in the show…so it should be extra fun.

There is an internet cafe across the street from the hotel we stay at (if it’s still in business), so hopefully I’ll be in and out at least once a day for about 20-30 min for any major updates. For anybody that will be in Ocean City this weekend, shoot me an e-mail if you want to meet up.

In the meantime, I have a couple of posts scheduled to go up throughout the rest of the week, enjoy!

So last week I made a post showing some pictures of my home office, and I tagged a few other bloggers to post theirs as well. Most of the bloggers I originally tagged have posted their pictures..the rest I am still bugging Some others have posted their pictures as well, and I’m adding them to the list at the bottom of the post. This is sort of turning into a blogosphere office compilation.

One of the bloggers I tagged, Brandon Hopkins, took my tagging to the next level by making a video of his office. I thought that was a cool concept, so I decided to make my own! First off, check out Brandon’s:

I still don’t know where his computer is, but as long as he somehow manages to keep updating the blog, I guess all is ok!

Here’s a video tour of my office, I also included a little clip of the Dodge Vipers in the garage per popular request:

Also, as an added extra bonus, check out this video I made for a TV Production class back in college. It’s an MTV Cribs episode of my apartment when I was living in Maryland:

If you want your blog added to the compilation, simply make a post with pictures and/or video of your office space. Make sure to link my blogger office space compilation post, and I’ll get you added to the list.

The Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) requires each of the three credit agencies to provide a free copy of your credit report on a yearly basis. The only thing you have to do is ask for it. The three companies (Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion) setup an official website where you can grab your report from the three agencies all at once, you can access it at AnnualCreditReport.com.

There are a lot of sites out there offering a free report or your credit score for free…be weary, they may be trying to steal your personal information or they may sell your info to spammers. I highly recommend getting your reports through the linked site, as they are 100% legit.

As an entrepreneur you have to make sure that your credit report is good, and that any mistakes are disputed. You never know when you need to do something like invest in a new business, or take a loan out to expand your own business. You’ll want to ensure that there are no rocky roads when doing so. I just ran my report, and everything looks good this year!

Update: I also made a video of my home office, make sure to check that out.

Joshua Dorkin (TimeForBlogging.com) made a post showing his home office, and asked other bloggers to show theirs. I’ve actually had a post idea similar to this in my drafts folder since the first couple weeks of starting the blog, but hadn’t gotten a chance to do it yet. Now felt like a good time.

Below you’ll find pictures of my home office setup. I’m calling out a few of you bloggers to show yours too! Here’s what I’ll do. Make a post on your blog showing your home office, and link to this post. I’ll have a running list of blogger offices (at the bottom of this post) and link to your post. To start off I’m calling out these guys specifically, but if you’re not on the list feel free to still do this:

1. John Chow
2. Brandon Hopkins
3. Darren Rowse
4. Ryan Christensen
5. Martin Reed

Here is my home office area…If you see the black box next to the blue box over the printer, that’s my computer. I’m using a Shuttle XPC which comes in a very small but powerful package:

A better picture of my desk, the other one is my roommates:

Here’s a closer look at my setup. I have two Dell 20.1″ widescreen monitors running in dual monitor mode (once you go dual, you never go back). I have a Dell laptop that I use anytime I’m traveling.

Here is the other side of the room with my roommates setup. The Camaro pictures you see on the wall are that of my his old car before he bought a Dodge Viper.

Here’s some shelf space on the back wall. The big red thing is the hard top from my Dodge Viper. Between the two Vipers, two dirt bikes, and two motorcycles in my garage, there is no room for the Viper roof!

At one point instead of the dinky TV you see in the pictures between the desks, I had an LG 37″ LCD TV, but I decided to hang it on the wall in my room instead This is what it looked like:

Other Blogger Offices

Here’s a running list of other blogger offices. Link to this post with a post of your office, and I’ll add you to the list.

• Joshua Dorkin | TimeForBlogging/BiggerPockets
• Jeremy Shoemaker | Shoemaker
• Manta SEO Solutions
• Blog-Op
• Francesco Mapelli | Mapelli.info
• Eleanor | EleanorBlog
• Minddriven
• Martin Reed | Community Spark
• Brandon Hopkins
• Andrew Flusche | Legal Andrew
• Jane May | Jane May Blogs

Today I’ve officially turned a 1/4 century old, as I am celebrating my 25th birthday. I’ll be going out to Sakura Steakhouse for dinner and Union Jacks for a little after-dinner drinking. Crystal will be coming into town as well, so it should be a great time!

On another side-note, all of the stocks I own are doing awesome today:

The obvious big hitters from today are Intuit and CNet. Intuit is doing good (finally!) because of an excellent 3rd quarter and raised outlooks from analyst firms. Intuit is the #2 highest gain stock today behind aQuantive, which you may know in the online advertising world for their Atlas ad serving technology. Microsoft picked them up today for $6 billion, a huge amount more per share then they are worth…and this jumped their stock almost 80% today. CNet is doing good because of analysts at First Albany reiterated their “buy” rating, and raised their target price from $10 to $11.

I got into stocks at first just as a forced way to learn more about the market. I only invested a small amount into one stock, but this pretty much forced me to watch it, and learn what affects the share price and many other things just from having to be more involved. The key to this is only to invest what you can afford to lose. Since then I have picked up a few other stocks, and although I had a great day today, overall I am still down. The main reason was from that original first stock (AMD), which lost over 60% of its value at one point. Overall I am down 7%, but things are looking better, and my other stocks have helped offset the loss from AMD. Now I understand when they say to diversify your portfolio.

I recently bought a Dodge Viper, and I mentioned that I’d be driving it around for free, or maybe even getting paid to drive it. So how am I doing this? Careful planning, and a lot of searching/watching for the right deal.

I know you’ve all heard that buying a car is the worst investment you can make. Go to the dealer, pick up the latest and greatest 2007, and watch it lose thousands of dollars as soon as you drive off the lot. That doesn’t sound like a very intelligent thing to do, right? But many of us do it anyway, we want that new car feeling, we want a warranty, and we want the latest thing on the road. I’m the same way, I do like having the latest and greatest, and have purchased two brand new cars in the past 6 years. I’ve also learned from my mistakes. Since buying my 2nd brand new car, I’ve purchased 5 vehicles (3 cars, a motorcycle, and a dirtbike), but they have all been used. I’ve extremely minimized my overall ownership costs on all of these vehicles, allowing me to invest more money into things that will make me more money.

So the most obvious thing here is to find a vehicle that you can get a really good deal on, but that also generally depreciates less than other vehicles. My circle of good friends are all into cars, and all have fast cars. Since I sold my twin turbo 350Z, I have been lacking a true sports car, so I wanted to something for the summer…but I wanted to minimize my cost of doing so. A Dodge Viper is a great car to do this with. I purchased a first generation Viper, which is considered a collectors car. I think they have pretty much depreciated to the point (or very close) where as long as the miles are fairly low, the price will not go much lower (some are even saying that they are starting to appreciate). I could probably park the car in my garage, put a few thousand miles a year on it, and sell it years later for a similar price that I paid. I essentially did that with my 350Z, except the difference was that I lost thousands of dollars!

How Do You Find A Good Deal?

To find my Dodge Viper, there were several important factors:

1. You have to have a budget, and stick to it. It’s hard to not go a little bit over what you wanted to spend, but you have to make a hard-line decision on what you can/want to spend.
2. You have to have the funds available and ready to purchase the car at any second. Having the funds without taking a loan will help minimize your total cost by a lot since there will be no interest paid. I’ll have a post later on about how a good friend of mine makes side-income buying and selling dirt bikes…you’ll see how offering what I call a “right-now” action will give you a huge upper hand in price negotiating.
3. You have to be able to negotiate pricing. You can’t be afraid to work numbers with somebody.
4. You have to be able to walk away from a deal if it’s not what you want. If the price is slightly too high, you need to be able to get yourself to wait for the next chance.
5. Be patient. Finding a good deal can be tough, but they are out there! Follow the guidelines, and you will eventually get one.

These can pretty much be relevant to negotiating anything you’re going to buy, not just a car.

The Search Begins

There will be some research required on your end. I watched forums, eBay, Autotrader, Craigslist, and more to get an idea of what a good price on the Viper is. I knew the general ranges of what they sell for, and I also got an idea of what some of the aftermarket parts go for. Why did I do that? Well the Viper I purchased for example had an aftermarket hard top and glass windows…these sell for $5,000 brand new. I should be able to sell it for around $1,500-$2,000 fast, and I can knock that off the total price of the car. In this scenario, it made a huge difference, and was a big factor in why I chose the car that I did.

After knowing the range that the car normally sells for, you can then begin your search. You obviously need to be able to get the car below or near the low range in order to maximize your deal. You have to factor in additional costs such as shipping and taxes/registration. Once you find the deal you want, jump on it as quickly as possible. Don’t give the seller the opportunity to have another buyer come in and offer higher. If the buyer doesn’t already require it, ask to pay a deposit (usually $500-$1,000) so he will remove the car from wherever it is being sold. This will stop other potential buyers from contacting and offering higher than what you did.

When I bought my Viper I was looking at one in Georgia and working on negotiating a deal. In the meantime I continued watching my sources, and found a perfect one come up on eBay. I immediately contacted the buyer and made an offer. He met me slightly more than halfway, and I sent a deposit for the car right away. This was all done within 2 hours of the seller posting the car on eBay! I’m 95% sure he would have gotten his buy it now price (and even had offers for higher), but because I utilized my action items, I got the car for $1,100 less than the buy it now price. On top of that, I can also take another $1,500-$2,000 off the bottom line when I sell the hard top and glass windows. Keep all this in mind, when you are working out a deal, continue to keep looking as a better one may be right underneath your nose.

Good luck, and if you have any questions or comments about finding a good deal, post a comment!

Last weekend Crystal and I went to Bamboozle Fest at Giants Stadium in New Jersey to see Linkin Park. Bamboozle Fest is a two day event where over 100 bands played. Each day there were two major headline bands, My Chemical Romance and Linkin Park. Crystal and I are both big Linkin Park fans, so we decided to go on Sunday for the day they were playing.

I’m not a huge concert kinda guy, but it ended up being a lot of fun. The weather wasn’t too hot, and there were plenty of vendor-type things going on all over the place. There were a ton of stages, so you could go and see a different bad at any time of the day. When Linkin Park played, they were the only band, so everybody watched them. We were at about the 5th row, just looking back there was an unlimited amount of people.

Here we are arriving at Giants stadium.

Even though Meadowlands (Giants stadium) is in NJ, it’s right across the water from New York City. Here you can see the NYC skyline from the stadium parking lot.

Here’s Crystal and I at the concert

I forget which band this is, but you can see how many people there were. When Linkin Park played, take this and multiply it by about 100.

Even more people behind me!

All of the pictures I took when Linkin Park was playing came out blurry, so this is the best you’ll get.

Overall it was definitely worth the $35/ticket, and I recommend checking it out next year if you are in the area. Linkin Park put on a really good show, this is the 2nd time I’ve seen them live.

Cross it off my dream cars to own list, I have officially bought my first Dodge Viper. After dealing with shipping companies for a week and a half, I finally found a good one to deal with. The car arrived in perfect shape, in just one day from being picked up in upstate NY. It was brought on an open trailer with just my car on it:

The car JUST clears the ramps:

And finally she is officially here:

I absolutely can’t stand the wheels, they make the car look like it came out of the 80’s (even though it’s not that far away). First thing to do was to swap the wheels with my buddies old wheels:

These wheels are from a newer model GTS Viper, they aren’t insane, but they make the car look about 10 years newer. I’d like to get some nice aftermarket ones, and I will be on the lookout for something used. New aftermarket wheels that fit the Viper normally start at about $5,000 with tires and go to about $9,000 for the stuff that I like.

Here’s a shot under the hood, this Viper has a 400hp V10 motor:

Here is my Viper and my roommates Viper parked next to each other in the garage:

I ended up getting a really great deal, and got a spectacular car considering it is 13 years old. It only has 14,729 miles on it! What are you doing about crossing items off your life to-do list?

I read a lot about how to have a good blog, how to get more readers, how to retain readers, etc. Almost all of the articles I read say to pick a niche, and stick with it. They all say don’t be too broad, if you’re going to write about optimizing for search engines, keep it on topic. I tend to write a little bit on the broader side of things, but I do have a niche.

What Is My Niche?

My niche is topics of interest for entrepreneurs, and I think I would be safe to say that young entrepreneurs in particular would have an even greater interest in my blog. You have to keep in mind that my blog is not meant to be just guides and tips for entrepreneurs, but things that an entrepreneur may have an interest in. For example, your average entrepreneur likes money, business, and nice things. I think the categories of topics I have generally fit the interest of most entrepreneurs:

• Cars: Whether it’s a slightly easier easier goal like the new BMW m3, or you’re shooting to get a Dodge Viper with a matching helicopter, cars are many times a source of inspiration for aspiring entrepreneurs.
• Business/Blogging/Web Sites: This category is about blogging tips, learning to use the web better, other websites out there, and web business.
• Design: We like nice looking things, whether it be a good looking website, or a piece of artwork.
• Friends & Family: This is more of the personable part of the my blog. My domain name is my name, you should be able to know more about me as a person than just some anonymous articles.
• Investing: We’ve all heard the phrase “It takes money to make money”. That’s what investing is all about. I’m definitely more in the beginning stages of learning about investing (like stocks, etc), so join me in my journey.
• Making Money: This is about ideas for making money, how much money I’ve made doing something, etc.
• My Business: I own a plethora of businesses (ActiveTuning, Tri Megatech, this blog, Video Experiment), and have had my share of projects in the past. I am constantly looking for new opportunity, and I love to share what I can.
• Off Topic: General off topic articles that I like. This can range from a really funny video to an article that really doesn’t match the content from other categories.
• Real Estate: Lets be honest, the last 10 years of real estate has been crazy. I’ve been trying to follow the market as much as possible, and I’m also looking for my first place to buy. This also includes more general real estate content like mansion hunting in Northern Viriginia.
• Reviews: This could be a review of anything from a new product I purchased to a website of interest (or paid) that I wanted to take a further look into.
• Technology: This new era of business revolves around technology. People have the opportunity to start a business in just a few clicks of a mouse. I talk about technology like eCommerce platforms, but even things like the latest plasma TV.
• Ramblings: This is similar to “Off Topic” but more related to my personal information.

I’d be interested to get a better idea of what my readers background and interests are. Are you an entrepreneur? If so, do these topics interest you? Are there other topics that you think I should be covering? If you’re not an entrepreneur, what interests you about this blog?