Whatsthecost.com member news

Finally!

Fri, 01 Feb 2008 00:00:00 GMT

After months of trying to find the time, I've finally added an option to allow you to delete transactions which you may have entered incorrectly!

It's something I'm being asked for a couple of times a week, and up until now it wasn't possible to delete a transaction, meaning that if you entered one wrongly, you'd either have to add a balancing transaction, or email me and ask me to delete it.

But now, you can do it yourself! Each transaction in the "Add Transactions" section of your snowball will now contain a "delete" button. I've also changed the order of the list while I was at it, so the most recent transactions are shown first.

Adam.

Carbon Neutral

Thu, 21 Jun 2007 00:00:00 GMT

I'm pleased to say that whatsthecost.com is now carbon neutral - And that includes you while you're using it!

Public Snowballs

Wed, 06 Jun 2007 00:00:00 GMT

Show others how well you're reducing your debt!

If you've created an account, and saved your snowballs at whatsthecost.com, you can now show others how well you're doing in your battle to reduce your debt!

Obviously, by default, no one else can see your snowballs. However, if you want to, you can now mark a saved snowball as "public".

This means you'll be able to share a web address with others, which will give an overview of your starting debt, the amount you've managed to pay off, your outstanding debt, and your debt free date.

If you run a blog or website you'll also be able to add a box into your webpage which tells everyone when your Debt Free Date will be.

It's important to note that your snowballs are still private by default. If you wish to make use of this feature you must first set your snowball to public access (Edit your snowball and set "Allow others to view my snowball" to "Yes).

For more information, have a look here.

Email Reminders

Wed, 21 Feb 2007 00:00:00 GMT

A couple of things today (I must have had too much time on my hands over the last week!).

First, this alert box will only contain a maximum of 3 boxes telling you about new features. This is to stop people getting flooded by news if they haven't logged into the site for a while. The RRS feed (see above) will always contain them all, so add that to your RSS reader of choice if you want to be kept up-to-date.

The big change today is the addition of "Email Reminders". The idea is that you can create reminders (one-off, weekly, monthly or yearly) which will automatically be emailed to your registered email address. I hope it should work fine, but do please let me know if you come across any problems,

You could, for example, use this service to remind you about important bills to pay, or when a 0% deal ends on a credit card. Or maybe set a yearly reminder to remind you a few days before your car insurance is due.

Of course you could also use it you remind you about birthdays or other non-financial events. It's up to you.

You will need to verify your email address in order to use this service (I needed to add that extra step to make sure the service isn't misused). If you have any concerns about adding your email address to your details here, then feel free to create a second account which just contains your email address and reminders and not any snowballs. Of course, you can continue to use this site without adding your email address. You'll only need it if you want to use the reminder service.

My Details

Tue, 20 Feb 2007 00:00:00 GMT

I've finally added a My Details section in the members area which allows you to change (or add) your email address, password and subscription options. Well overdue I know!

Important Changes

Mon, 19 Feb 2007 00:00:00 GMT

First, thanks for all the feedback people have sent me with regards to the saved snowballs over the last few months.

One of the biggest problems people seemed to have was understanding the way that snowballs were "reconciled". Looking at it objectively, I can see it wasn't a very intuitive way to do it, and wasn't giving people the flexibility they required.

So I've completely revamped this area of the "My snowballs" section. You no longer "reconcile" snowballs, you simply have the ability to manually add new debits and credits to each account within a snowball. You can add transactions whenever you want to, so you can keep your snowball up-to-date. Hopefully this is far more flexible, and should be easier to use.

I've also added the ability to edit certain areas of the snowball. You can now edit the monthly snowball payment, and can edit the name and interest rate for each account.

Sorry these changes have taken me so long to do! As you may, or may not know, I run WhatsTheCost.com as a hobby, and with a "proper" job, quite a bit of freelance work, and a 2 year old son, I haven't had as much time as I'd like to make these changes.

As always, feedback is always welcome to info@whatsthecost.com

Thanks,
Adam.

News boxes

Mon, 19 Feb 2007 00:00:00 GMT

I've added these news boxes today. The idea being whenever I add anything new to Whatsthecost.com I'll mention it quickly here. Once you've read the news item you can click on the "Don't show this again" button at the bottom, and you won't see it the next time you login.

The reason for adding this is that I'm planning on making a few additions to the members area of whatsthecost.com over the next few weeks/months, so wanted an easy way of telling people about them.

Thanks,
Adam.