Personal Finance Interview with Budget Pulse’s Craig

I’m doing two part interviews with bloggers on two of my personal sites. I’m excited to have Craig from Budget Pulse answer a few of my questions on this new project. The first part is here on Green Panda Treehouse. The second part is on Vega Baja Productions. If you’re a blogger and wouldn’t mind being interviewed, please feel free to contact me.

Craig, could you tell us a little about yourself?

I am 23 years old and am the marketing manager for BudgetPulse.com, a manual personal budgeting software.  I joined the team in August 08 after moving from NY to the DC area.  I have a marketing background from Penn State, love watching my sports teams, connecting with others online, and always looking for my next backpacking trip.

What motivated you to join BudgetPulse?

I really enjoy working with online marketing and the internet industry as a whole.  Growing up with the internet and social networking I have really taken a liking to it and wanted to get involved with it post college.  BudgetPulse stood out for me because it is a software that personally has helped me get on the right track with my finances.  It was a very young and new site when I joined the team and saw the potential that it has to be developed into something that truly can help a lot of people out.

With the Rudder situation, how does BudgetPulse compare?

It was a tough hit for the whole online budgeting software companies when the Rudder news broke.  I have personally met the owners and they are good guys and I feel for them in their situation.  But it is an isolated event and hopefully users can not look down on the industry as a whole.

Our situation is different because we do not and will never sync with banks.  Identity theft is very serious and something we do not want to risk for ourselves, and do not want to put our users at risk either.  Their situation was also based off the fact that there was issues with the email system something that we currently do not do.  Especially with a start-up it is hard to develop trust from users, and we are taking all security measures to prove we are trustworthy to our users, and that is one of the main reasons we do not sync with banks.

What are your favorite personal finance books?

“I Will Teach You to be Rich” by Ramit Sethi is a book I recently finished and thought it was terrific.  Sethi is another personal finance blogger who speaks directly to his audience, most which like myself are younger.  His language and sarcasm fit perfectly with his ideals he preaches about playing it safe and trying to build savings over time vs. trying to get lucky and beat the system.  I personally directly took action based off of a few of his recommendations and they are simple and easy to understand for anyone at any level.  He even offers dialogue’s for how to handle customer service reps.  Everyone in their twenties should be reading this book.

What do you hope to accomplish in the next year with BudgetPulse?

We have worked extremely hard over the past few months to develop a completely brand new revamped site for BudgetPulse that will be released in mid June for everyone.  The site will be visually enhanced, easier to navigate, will have improved content and functionality, and even video tutorials.  For the fun of it as well we are working on some humorous videos for everyone to sit back and enjoy for a quick minute.  Once the new release is out in June, we will get right back to working on our next release which will bring a group fund functionality, working on an iphone app, more extensive charts, and in the future will look to have the site in multiple languages for all our international users.  This is just a small list of items we will be working on.

If you received a tax free $10,000 check, how would you spend/save it?

I have really taken strides on setting up both my short term and long term financial future.  With the check I would first max out my Roth IRA for the year and put a bulk of the rest into savings or an investment account.  I don’t think that everything should go into savings though, we are entitled to enjoy money and can spend it consciously.  I love traveling and am working on planning an adventure trip for later in the year that the money would go towards, or for a future trip down the road.

What’s the most important/practical financial tip someone should remember?

This may be very simple and something that has been put in my head so many times as well with everyone else, but simply, you can’t spend what you don’t have.  That’s as downright simple advice as I have received and stick to it with my life and my purchases.  If there is a big item I want to buy, I make a schedule and save up a little each month till I can pay in full.  Collecting debt and watching it grow can hurt in so many ways that the advice has really stuck with me and I don’t want to develop bad spending habits.  It is advice that everyone needs to know and can easily follow.

Please subscribe to Budget Pulse’s blog and chat with Craig on Twitter.

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