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Microworld: HiFi: Personal Household Finance Manager
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Author:James E. White

Welcome to HiFi !

HiFi is a real-time personal household finance manager. HiFi is also an Expert System and a Planner. Essentially HiFi regards your checking and savings accounts as a structured system of objects, called simply accounts.

HiFi manages 6 types of accounts. Three of these types are Debit accounts, that is, bills that you pay. And three of these types are Asset accounts, that is sources of money to pay the bills.

Each time you start HiFi, you begin a Session in which you will have a conversation with it during which it will ask you questions and make recommendations. These are called Report Dialogs. At the end of each 2-week period, HiFi will ask you to make a certain bank transfer, and during the period, it will ask you to pay certain bills that have come due. You may of course do this online if that is convenient.

First, you teach HiFi what your accounts are, what bills you pay, when they come due, and how frequently, and whether or not they vary in amount. Next you tell HiFi about your Fluid expenses, that you normally pay using cash or ATM debit. Here, you choose a number of categories of expenditures, such as Food, Entertainment, Household or Garden expenditures, and so on, and you estimate what you expect to spend in each category. This gives HiFi a starting budget for your fluid expenditures, and over the course of a few months, HiFi will help you shape that budget in light of your realistic expenditures.

All of these accounts are objects, and HiFi is an object too, called the Manager. The objects "talk" among themselves. For example, HiFi can ask each account specific questions, such as "Are you due to be paid this period? If so, can you estimate your amount?" And accounts can share information with other accounts. For example, if the entertainment budget overspends in a period, it will ask HiFi to ask your permission to "borrow" from another fluid account, such as Food, that may have some extra funds. In this way, over the course of time, you and HiFi can shape your budgets to your own habits of spending.

And HiFi will plan for the future, setting aside money each period for upcoming bills like Auto Registration or AAA dues, that always seem to come out of left field when we use more "seat of the pants" techniques. No more! When a bill comes due, the money will be there to pay it. Usually, HiFi silently moves these escrows over to the savings account until just before they are due, so that they can earn a little interest.

Of course, another advantage is that as you have your weekly (or twice weekly) dialogs with HiFi, it will remind you which bills are due now. A simple scenario with HiFi is to pay your bills online when HiFi asks you to pay them. If you do not pay them when HiFi asks, it continues to remind you in the dialogs until you do.

While we live in a world where nearly all interactions with computers are through "objects" (for example, your mouse is an object, as are the windows that populate your screen) the objects that make up HiFi are ones that you create and that give your bank accounts a dynamic structure. But you are not constrained by that structure. HiFi also makes apparent what it does not need, so that you can easily decide whether that trip to the zoo this weekend is O.K.

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