Financial Planning

Personal Finance Interview with Joel Mueller of Macupdate.com

Written by Mint
Published Mar 26, 2007
2 min read
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Name: Joel Mueller
Age: 27
Net worth Range: $1+
Profession/Title: Servant Leader
Websites: macupdate.com, hostsolutions.com, joelmueller.com

Current Financial Strategy:

Cash flow oriented.

Best Financial Tip:

Read Rich Dad, Poor Dad. Twice.

Worst Financial Move Ever:

Spending on small liabilities that don’t have a certain return on investment.

Financially I need help with:

Mentorship from the types of people who build skyscrapers….or cities….or even nations.

What personal finance tools do you currently use to track and manage your money?

Wells Fargo online. QuickBooks Pro.

What are the problems in your personal finance tools?

Problems with my current financial applications aren’t created with clear imports and categorization of my bank account data imports. I have to manually download the bank statement transactions. Manually import them into QuickBooks. And then the big time waster is manually changing EVERY single entry I’ve imported to categorize it properly and re-name it so that the account is listed as a company I recognize (ie – “Whole Foods” vs. “Whole Food Incorporated W. Front St. Kzoo, MI 066-99.”)

How would your ideal personal finance tool work?

My ideal personal finance tool would allow you to auto-grab the latest data from your bank and import it into the general ledger. From there you could edit the tags/categories and names of expensed companies. Then the solution would learn the labels and tags that I give certain entries. Because of this intelligence, the more repetitive expenses that occur, the more it learns how to auto-categorize and re-format, and the less I have to manually edit each journal entry to keep things properly organized and clean.

From there, I would hope I could re-export it into the format I originally imported it from, and import the fresh data into QuickBooks, all clean.

Eventually, when the solution becomes really smart about my tags, it could be an automated import/clean/export process.

Nearly hands-off balancing of the checkbook (trusting the bank info is correct). 10+ hours a month saved.

What more do you want to know about your personal finances?

A dashboard page would be nice to give a quick overview of things. In QuickBooks you need to manually generate reports.

How often do you want to know about your personal finances?

Bi-weekly at least.

What is in your wallet?

Actually, I don’t carry a wallet. I carry my drivers license and a debit card with me in my pocket. Nothing else.

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