Productive Organizer

I chanced upon this Stock Portfolio Manager project from a site that focus on DRIP investing.

I was pretty impress by it but found that it is not as suitable as my Free Stock Portfolio Tracking Google Spreadsheet. But nevertheless I thought that perhaps some folks would appreciate it.

Why need a tool like this

We talk about the importance of planning financially at different stage of your life so that you do not get to a state where you lose financial control (see Frugal Living)

One portion of the plan is to plan for your nested egg or having adequate money for retirement. Investing in stocks is one of the solutions.

There are many tools or websites that does this but not many focus on enabling you to key in transactions and different currencies.

The Use Case for Stock Portfolio Manager

1. A portfolio manager that works on different platforms
2. Able to let the user fill in his own stocks whether US or international based
3. Able to let the user update based on transactions (buy, sell or dvidends)
4. Able to provide graphing to let the users do a portfolio review

I thought this tool does a pretty competent job. What stopped me from exploring further is that there Is limited currency selection and that for transactions I believe there are more frequently encountered transactions other than buy,sell and dividends.

This application is free and if you are interested to try and see if it works for you, you can download it from here.

Sometimes the most difficult decision one can make is to take that big scary step. That is what Sierra Black did. She had tough decisions to make and i liken what she had to face as the same as a trader whose stocks have not gone his or her way.

In her case, she had to cut loss on a home to move into a smaller one. Hats off to her for able to make that big step. Not many would be able to. If they were able to, its when its all too late.

Now she is reaping the benefits of it all:

1. Less Expenses  more Cashflow
2. More time to spend with family
3. Better living environment

I think we all can learn alot from her.

This is a guest post from Sierra Black, a long-time GRS reader. She writes about frugality, sustainable living, and getting her kids to eat kale at Childwild.com.

When my husband and I first got married, we bought a house in the suburbs and promptly had a baby. Buying that house meant buying a piece of the American Dream — but we both figured out pretty quickly that it wasn’t our dream.

I will never forget coming home from the hospital with that precious little girl and looking around my huge suburban home with a sense of confused dread. “What happened to my apartment?” I said. “What happened to my life?”

Big problems
I stayed home with our baby for a year, living on savings, and then went back to work full time. The baby went to daycare for ten hours a day, and most of my salary went there with her.

I was driving 40 miles north every day to work at a newspaper, while my husband drove 40 miles south to his research job at a major university. He’d leave the house at 8 a.m. and often come home after midnight. On a “good day” he could get home for dinner with me around 8 p.m.

Meanwhile, I’d come home exhausted with a cranky kid, only to have my boss call during our late dinner to tell me that something on my beat was on fire (sometimes literally) and I had to go cover it. On the weekends, instead of hanging out with friends or having adventures, we got to mow our lawn, clean the ten rooms of our lovely home and try to balance our finances.

We were exhausted, miserable, lonely and broke.

We lived like this for two years, and then things started to fall apart. First I left my job to have a second child. Having become a stay-at-home mom, I was starting to get serious about cutting the fat from our budget. I started with the small things:

• canceling our Netflix subscriptions
• scaling back on dining out
• buying store brand groceries

It felt like I was bailing out a leaky boat with a teaspoon. Something bigger would have to change.

[Read the rest of this wonderful story at Get Rich Slowly >>]