We have a number of things we want to buy, but without a limitless supply of money, we have to prioritise the things we want and then get them one at a time. Seems easy and it is really, but why not make it a bit harder…

Microsoft Money tells us how much money we have in our savings account so it should be possible to link that information to a list of things we want and then show that if we bought, say, that new plasma TV, we’d have to live without the PSP or the new car (ha ha I wish! in reality we’re not talking about things anywhere near that exciting).

Getting information from Money is not easy and I had to hack at that. I found an application that would export Money data to Excel, but that’s not really good enough. I want the data feeding to a gadget and don’t want to mess about with intermediate applications. So I found how this app works and hacked it so it would allow my program to use it to read from Money. My program just writes an XML file with the account balances – as insecure as hell, but this is all restricted to my own PC. Then I wrote a web service that would read that XML as well as maintain a wish list in a separate XML file.

I’ve had lots of practice writing gadgets so I took my stock portfolio gadget and used that to display the account balance and then the list of things we want. Each of these items has a price, so there’s a running balance that goes down towards zero with each item. I show the things we can afford in green and the things that we don’t have enough money for in red. I can re-order the items in the list. So if I put the plasma TV at the top, and it’s going to use up most of our savings then we can’t afford the new bathroom, but if I move the TV further down we could afford the bathroom and a holiday.

I still have a bit of work to do (the re-ordering feature and adding a “new item” page). I don’t know if it will be of interest to anyone else, particularly since it needs to have the account information from Money