A few weeks ago my MacBook lost its charge. I plugged in the adapter, and the green light didn’t come on telling me it was getting charged. I disconnected, reconnected, (no, I didn’t blow into the adapter — though that always worked for Duck Hunt) but didn’t have any success. Then one time I did actually get the light to come on and I left it for a few hours. When I came back, I tried to fire up the computer and
Nothing.
I disconnected the adapter and the green light was still glowing (?).
I didn’t buy Apple’s AppleCare or whatever you call it.
Anyway, so I took it into an Apple store and they ran a diagnostic. The motherboard failed. It’ll cost $850 + labor to have a new motherboard installed. I brought in an external hard drive and they said they backed up the entire hard drive. In the meantime, I bought a new Dell laptop for $700.
Our budget file, it’s called Mecham’s Budget.ynab, is on that external hard drive — I’m hoping. We were running Windows on the Mac with Parallels and I’m hoping against hope that they got everything off the hard drive and not just the Mac OS docs. Tonight I’ll plug in the hard drive and see exactly what we have left.
If they didn’t…if we lost our budget…that’d be said. I think we have data in there from 2005.
So we didn’t budget for September because of this whole computer issue. As a result, we’ve declared a moratorium on spending. Well, not really. But darn close. Things will be fine. Over the past five years the budget has trained us to not spend money unnecessarily (for the most part), so I’m not completely freaked out by the fact that we’re operating without a map, rudder, compass…PLAN.
Right now in our checking account there’s this pile of money. I’m staring at it and I’m wondering what it’s all supposed to do. I know we had some money set aside for furniture — a couple hundred dollars I think… I know we’ve been putting $25 per month in the furniture fund…I think $100 in the car repairs fund… but I have no idea on exact numbers. Tithing? Eh..we pay it monthly, but I really leaned on the budget to tell me what the exact amount was supposed to be. Did we already handle August? I can’t remember.
What is the point of that pile of money in the checking account? I feel lost.
If the budget is lost forever, then we’ll just have to do what everyone does when they first start. Take that pile of money and start deciding what it should be doing. We’ll just have to develop a fresh PLAN.
What about all of that historical data? It didn’t really serve much of a purpose except for the geek inside of me to be able to see what we had spent on groceries in July of 2006. The important stuff hasn’t happened yet. The important part of budgeting is what you will do, not what you have done.
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This is The Wallet. My name is Jesse Mecham, founder of YNAB. Here I focus on the YNAB methodology, software, personal finance, and more.
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Pam Fingerle
September 25, 2008
Hi Jesse – greetings from Germany. Hope, you are doing fine. Hope to hear/read from you. Pam, Tobias and the kids.
mike
September 25, 2008
quit worrying about your budget, and start worrying about a Backup regime
Jesse
September 26, 2008
You ask too much of me Mike. I do have a backup system now in place…too little too late though. Here’s hoping it’s safe on the external hard drive.
Josh
October 4, 2008
I’ve been running parallels on my mac at work, and one important tip I learned from our techs is too keep all data on the mac side, not “in” the windows data partition, which can easily get corrupted. I’ve been running parallels about a year and already had it fail on me once, and windows had to be reinstalled. … Fortunately all my data was networked on the mac side, and was easily restored to my windows apps after it was reinstalled.
Fernando
October 5, 2008
Hello, Jesse. So, is it there still?
Michael Moore
October 6, 2008
Jesse,
If they didn’t get everything off your hard drive, send me an email. We’re still in town here and I can get everything off it for you.
Michael Moore
steve
October 30, 2008
Hi, former YNABer here just happening to read your blog. I’m sorry you lost your file. I thought I would share what I do for files that I absolutely don’t want to lose *no matter what*. I simply use my Gmail account and send myself an email (I address it to myself, so it ends up in my inbox) and attach the file in question. You could do that with your budget file and be sure that no matter what happened, Google would have a copy of the file saved for you in your inbox. In some ways I think this is better than a backup on an external hard drive, because it’s in a different physical location and can’t get stolen or otherwise destroyed.
Chris
April 17, 2009
Just a thought. Why not purchase one or two things.
1) Thumb drive – dedicated ONLY to budget and your financial life. It could be the best $20 you spend. Even if you loose your computer, it’s all right there ready to go (including the YNAB software if you want).
2) External hard disk (you mentioned this) – back up your personal data files ONLY to this about every 3 months or so. I have 1 that is used primarily for family pictures/movies using a digital camera. Caveat Emptor: Don’t leave this thing plugged in the whole time. It causes the device to fail prematurely if you do (since there is a large spike in voltage, and the disk is spinning for so long with no reason) … this information comes from a professional photographer who has lost the digital pictures that he has taken of other families because of this.