-sam

Thanks Sam, I'll take another look at gnuCash.

Well, I don't have any problem coding, but I've been learning how to budget and so far, the best tool is Quicken. arg! I want more than simply tracking my finances and generating alerts when a budget item is exceeded. I'm a monitoring engineer and what quicken, mint, and gnucash and all of them do is simply "monitoring". you collect the data, set a threshold, and then react. There's some reports, but they're all simple charts, nothing statistical.

I want to predict; I want to use the tool to help me make my decisions, find the shortest path, etc. And I'm not talking about stock market prediction, either. Just simple stuff like: Given 12 months history, how much should I budget for my Gas & electric bill? What's the variance for a budget item? Are there patterns in my spending? What's the best snowball scenario, and how much can I redirect to paying down debt?

I don't need to replace stuff that Mint does, I just want to do some intelligent budgeting. There are a few spreadsheets out there that help with snowball, but they're cumbersome.

So I'm thinking I need to start by learning some basics of financial programming. I remember classes I took (very long time ago) where the examples were always financial applications. Being young and stupid, I thought "I'll never need this stuff" so I paid attention to the code and forgot the technique. Now that I actually have money, I want to put my skills to it!

Anyway, I was hoping that someone knew of something (book, course, code) that specifically deals with money management.

Not sure if this will meet all your needs, but The Budget Kit looked promising enough for me to purchase it at a used book store recently. (Too many $client emergencies for me to have looked at it yet, however...)

HTH,

planetscape