Welcome to Your Dough!

Your Dough is about personal finance.  In other words, it’s about helping you save your dough.

We’re James and Tim. We’re two thirty-something friends who grew up two blocks apart and, years later, started a company called Without Software.  You can find out more about our company here: http://www.withoutsoftware.com and about the two of us here: http://blog.yourdough.com/?page_id=2

There are lots of personal finance (often shortened to “PF”) blogs out there.  What’s special about ours?

If you read PF blogs then you already know the first rule of Personal Finance: Don’t talk about Fight Clu… er… Spend less than you earn!

That’s a nearly unbeatable catch-phrase. It’s short. It’s powerful. It’s also not at all helpful. It’s vague philosophy without practical guidance.

That’s where Your Dough comes in. We’re all about the “how-to”. And sometimes a little math geekery*.

We’ve got tons of ideas and links to pass along as we go forward.  As important, though, is the companion website we’ve created at http://yourdough.com. There you’ll find an ever growing suite of free calculators and other quick tools as well as our personal finance toolkit. You can sign up and use it immediately for free. We designed it to be used with your spouse/partner so you can always know where you stand, at least financially. The idea is to keep track of your spending (it’s really, REALLY easy) and after a month or two turn your history into a forward-looking budget. It works best if  you turn it into a bit of a game.

* We can’t promise we won’t sometimes skip the math part.