Ok, until I get this plug-in done, or until someone points me to something nicer, I can’t do charts easily. But that doesn’t mean I can’t post.

It’s February 12th and I have yet to update you on my progress for January, so here it is (without charts until the plug-in is done).

I set out at the beginning of January to do the following for 2008:

1. Eliminate credit card debt. It was $9352 and was $8960 at the end of January, 4.2% progress.
2. Eliminate other debt. Thanks to selling some books on Amazon, along with my scheduled payment, this is now down to $926 from the original $1043. This represents 11.2% progress. This is quite good, since I am attacking this one at a minimum of $100 per month to finish it off by October or November.
3. Increase Cash to $1000. Well, I’ve achieved total cash of $319, down from December’s assessment, but December’s true cash was about $0 due to immediate bills. This is 31.9% of my goal, and I hope to finish it off by March or April.
4. Increase Retirement from $1521 to $3768, a total of $2247.  As of the end of January, I was at $1654, a $133 increase, amounting to 5.9% of my goal.  I believe that this low percentage has more to do with the market downturn, since I’ve made contributions about on par with what I expected.
5. Increase Stock Investments to $400, from $283.  Well, this one is not going so well.  Thanks to the market slump, it is actually down $6, despite the inclusion of uninvested funds in my account.
6. Purchase $200 in savings bonds, of which I’ve discovered I already have a $50 EE paper bond ($25), which I’m not counting towards my goal, but I have purchased a $25 I electronic bond through Treasury Direct.  This officially puts me at 25% of my goal, and a total, including accumulated interest, of $64.
7. I didn’t originally put my end of year net worth as a goal, but I did mention my expected outcome, and thus a conversion is made.  I expected to raise my net worth by a total of $13995 and have raised it by $405 through due diligence and “windfalls.”  This amounts to 2.9% progress.

While I haven’t achieved the 8.3% progress required to achieve these goals, I am working on finding a better paying job.  Success at this particular goal will determine the true probability of success for the year.  As it stands, I’ve applied to one company and posted my resume on both CareerBuilder and Monster, with a nibble, via Career Builder, as of this afternoon.

I like the charts I am putting up, but I want to have them display in my posts (rather than link to them).  In order to make this work properly, I have to write a plug-in to allow the use of the charting software I use.  I use PHP/SWF Charts and XML/SWF Charts whose only differences are that the PHP version includes some PHP scripts.  You can find out more about them by visiting http://www.maani.us/charts/index.php or http://www.maani.us/xml_charts respectively.

Stay tuned for more, including the first public release of the plug-in by the end of this week.

What is the time-value of money? It is an estimate of what particular sum of money will be worth within a particular time-frame. From this you can see what needs to be done to achieve your goals.

There are two categories to this:

1. Future Value of Money: How much a particular present amount will be worth after a particular time at a particular interest rate.
2. Present Value of Money: How much an amount in a particular period is worth today at a particular interest rate.

Each category can be further broken down into an annuity or a single amount. An annuity is an amount paid in at the end of each compounding period. This makes comparing single amounts and and annuities difficult to compare with conventional equations.

The traditional equation for the future value of an annuity is , it can be converted from end of period payment to start of period payment by multiplying by , resulting in . In order to compare these, we also need the equation for the single amount, which is .

If you want to put away a certain total principle, it is far more powerful to take that amount and deposit it all at once, rather than as an annuity over the same period of savings. For example (see a chart here), an annuity of $1 per year for 40 years ($40 total) at 6% APR will grow to $165, but if you take that $40 and deposit all at once, at the same rate and period, it will grow to $411. That’s 2.5 times more than as an annuity and over 1000% growth compared to 400% for the annuity. This is not to say that annuities are bad, but shows how time can have a significant impact on a total particular principle.