Maria’s Guides

A never-published sidebar.

In July, while I was working on the eleventh edition of Quicken 2009: The Official Guide for Quicken Press, I wrote the following sidebar for Chapter 13. But by the time I had completed it I realized that it was probably not a good addition to the book for various liability reasons. So I pulled it out and wrote this post, dating it to appear after the Quicken book was published.

I need to stress that the only thing I’m advising here is for people to be conservative when borrowing money. I don’t want to see the U.S. economy getting any worse, and I certainly don’t want to hear stories about people — especially people with families — losing their homes. Consider my advice and take it with a grain of salt. While there’s no reward without risk, there’s also a lesser chance of loss without it.

Here’s my unpublished sidebar:

Mortgage Options: What Does This Mean To You?

I’m not a financial advisor and I don’t feel comfortable giving financial advice. But here’s one piece of advice I feel I must give in this eleventh edition of my Quicken book: Don’t make unrealistic assumptions.

The mortgage crisis that’s currently going on in this country is due, in part, to unrealistic assumptions made by borrowers. Some people assumed that the home they were buying would quickly rise in value so it would be worth far more than they were paying in just a year or two. They reasoned that they could always sell it at profit if they had trouble making mortgage payments. Other people assumed that rates would continue to stay low or even go lower, so payments on their adjustable rate mortgages would stay the same or be reduced. And most people probably assumed that the economy would stay strong, fuel prices wouldn’t rise, and they’d stay employed.

Hindsight is 20-20. As we saw, the worst combination of economic changes recently hit the U.S. The “housing bubble” burst and home values declined. Soon, many people’s mortgages — some for 90% or 100% of the home’s purchase price! — exceeded the value of their homes. Some homes could only be sold at a loss, with the seller still in debt on a home he no longer owned. Interest rates rose and adjustable rate mortgages rose with them. The cost of living increased, making it difficult for many people to cover their living expenses and pay their mortgage. A rash of layoffs throughout the country left many people unemployed. It was the perfect storm.

When I advise readers not to make assumptions, I’m warning those of you considering a home purchase not to make the same mistakes that other home buyers made over the few years before the housing bubble burst. They assumed best case scenario and they were proven very wrong. It may be better to assume the worst case scenario. If housing values remain flat or decline, mortgage rates rise, the cost of living continues to rise, or you lose your job, can you still afford the home you’ve selected with the mortgage deal you’ve chosen? If not, perhaps you need to find a better deal or choose a more affordable home.

Be smart — not sorry.

After over a year of soul-searching, I decide to spin off my book support topics to their own site.

I built my first Web site back in the mid 1990s. It was a simple site, created in HTML, that provided information about me and my books.

A [Very] Brief History of my Web Site(s)

The Internet was young back then — at least as far as the masses were concerned. Few people surfed. In fact, the whole idea of going online was so new and radical back then that my first book proposal, which was about telecommunications on a Mac, was turned down because publishers felt that there wouldn’t be enough people interested in it.

Anyway, as things heated up, I soon saw the benefits of putting more information on the Web. And then, in 2003, I discovered blogging. Surely my personal blog should be separate from what I write to support my books and articles, right? So I spun off a new site, LangerBooks.com, and published plain HTML Web pages with book promotional and support information.

Meanwhile, I fell in love with the whole blogging interface. There was no question in my mind: a blog was a perfect tool for presenting new content while automatically archiving old content. So I got LangerBooks.com into a blog format, with a separate blog for each title.

Back in those days (2003-2004), it wasn’t easy for me. I’d decided to blog with a program called iBlog that had a lot of promise. Unfortunately, its author wasn’t willing or able to keep up with technology. His software generated static HTML documents for each page of a blog. The more you wrote, the more cumbersome the whole blog updating process became. And, as those of you who read this blog regularly know, I can write an awful lot.

So in January 2005, I made the jump to WordPress. It was a big jump indeed, since I knew absolutely nothing about PHP or MySQL and very little about CSS. (What made it even bigger was that I was hosting my own blog on my own server.) I learned what I needed to know. One of the best things about WordPress is that you don’t need to know much to build a really professional looking site.

Around the same time, I decided that I didn’t want to maintain separate blogs for my books. So I brought all the books back under MariaLanger.com and came up with some creative ways to keep Book Support topics separate from the rest of the site. Creative, yes. Effective, perhaps.

One Blog to Rule them All?

Of course, the whole time I was doing this, I was reading from “pro bloggers” about how important it is to keep your blog on just one topic. These guys were blogging to make money, I argued to myself. They weren’t in it because of a need to blog or a desire to provide additional information to book readers. So I pretty much ignored them.

But their advice was eating away at my brain in the back of my mind. After much thought, I realized that having too many widespread topics in my blog was preventing the blog from being more popular. For example, people interested in my flying and lifestyle posts — which, according to a poll on my site, is about 30% of the site’s visitors — were probably bored silly with my Mac OS and Excel and WordPress posts. And people interested in getting book support (16% of visitors) weren’t interested in wading through the other content to get the bits of information that could help them. This was preventing me from getting more site subscribers and regular readers.

So about two weeks ago, I decided to make the split.

Drumroll, Please

The question of how I did it is something I can discuss as a WordPress-related post. Let’s just say that I’ve done the basic work and have enough content in the new blog to open it to the public.

So here’s the formal announcement:

Support for my books and articles can now be found at the Maria’s Guides Web site: http://www.mariasguides.com/.

If you’re reading this post there, you’ve already found it. Otherwise, if you’re interested in articles, tips, and downloads related to my books about Mac OS, Excel, Word, and WordPress, please go check it out.

And yes, occasionally there will be cross posts, like this one. But I’ll try to keep that to a minimum.

Why Maria’s Guides?

A few years back, I made a false start on a line of eBooks. I abandoned the project, primarily because I got busy with other things that were more interesting (and lucrative). I’m thinking of revisiting the idea with shorter eBooks covering a wider range of topics. Maria’s Guides was the working title of the series and I own the domain name, so why not?

An update on the book’s revision status.

At this point, Peachpit Press has decided not to revise my QuickBooks 2006 for Macintosh: Visual QuickStart Guide for the next version of QuickBooks. This is a financially-based decision; the current book’s sales were not sufficient to warrant a revision.

That doesn’t mean we won’t revise the book for a future version. We just don’t plan on doing it for the next version. (Remember, we also skipped the 2005 version.)

If you’d like to see an edition of the QuickBooks VQS for the next version of QuickBooks for Macintosh, contact Peachpit Press and let them know. If enough people contact Peachpit about this, they could reconsider their decision.

I retire the old, underutilized system and replace it with a simpler, spam-protected solution.

One of the biggest challenges I have as an author is providing clarifications and corrections of my work to readers on request.

In the beginning, I used to just answer questions submitted via e-mail. But when I started getting dozens of questions a week — half of which covered the same handful of topics over and over — I knew I needed a better solution.

So I built a FileMaker Pro powered database of questions and answers that I called the FAQ system. That worked fine for several years, with only two problems: people who neglected to read the previous questions and answers before repeating a question and readers of one particular Windows book (which will go unnamed here) who were absolutely obnoxious in their requests for help. (I subsequently cut that books questions and answers right of my database and stopped providing support.)

Years passed. I switched to a WordPress-based site. I didn’t have any desire to update the old FileMaker Pro database to match the new site’s interface. I needed a new solution. I switched to an XD-Forum forum-based FAQ system. It worked very much like the FileMaker Pro database, but with one big difference — site visitors refused to use it.

Oh, don’t get me wrong — I did get a few questions I could answer. But the majority of people decided to e-mail me instead. Since I don’t provide support by e-mail anymore, their questions remained unanswered.

Two weeks ago, my support forums were attacked by spammers and I had no software to protect it against future attacks. I needed a new solution.

So today I instituted a comment-based Q & A support system. In the support pages for each of my books, there’s a Q & A link. Following that link takes the visitor to a page that provides introductory information and a list of the questions and answers submitted so far. At the end of the questions and answers is a form they can use to ask a new question. The form utilizes the site’s comment feature, so all entries are filtered by Spam Karma, the excellent spam protection software by dr Dave. Very little spam should get through, and, if it does, getting rid of it is as easy as clicking a link. Registration is not required — although an e-mail address is — and visitors can elect to “subscribe” to comments so they get their answer, as well as related questions and answers, delivered right to their e-mail box. E-mail addresses do not appear online and I don’t use the ones I get for anything. In fact, I don’t even know how to retrieve them from the bowels of WordPress. So you don’t have to worry about spam coming from me.

So if you see any articles on this site referring to an FAQ system, they now refer to the Q & A system.

Let’s hope this works.

Another Article for Advisor Basics is published.

My article, “Streamlining Data-Entry with Value Lists,” for Advisor Basics of FileMaker Pro has been released.

For those of you who are wondering why I write about FileMaker Pro, here are the reasons:

• I’ve written three books about FileMaker Pro (although none of them are currently in print).
• I’ve been using FileMaker since 1990 (before it was Pro).
• I think FileMaker Pro is the best database applications out there for mortal users.

Information from the Updater Read Me File

Changes in R4:

File operations

• You can now use QuickBooks on the same network server as the one your

  company file is located on. If another user has accessed the company file,

  you will see that the file is locked.

• An issue with unexpected QuickBooks behavior when backing up to

  QuickBooks for Windows has been resolved.

• An issue with unexpected QuickBooks behavior when opening a company

  file with the setting “Show Reminders List when QuickBooks starts” has been

  resolved.

• An issue with a memory leak when condensing a company file has been

  resolved.

Online banking

• Improvements have been made to the online banking feature, including: 1)

  pressing Return in the Downloaded Transactions window automatically

  performs the default action, like Add to Register, and 2) after adding a

  transaction to the register, the Downloaded Transactions window

  automatically selects the next transaction.

• An issue with unexpected QuickBooks behavior when the filename of an

  online banking file (.qbo) contains a ‘+’ (plus sign) has been resolved.

• Double-clicking on an online banking file (.qbo) now launches QuickBooks

  with the last company file that was opened.

Reports

• Account names are now properly displayed in Profit & Loss reports after

  upgrading from QuickBooks 2005 for Mac.

• An issue with unexpected QuickBooks behavior when creating a report that

  shows a company name with special characters has been resolved.

• Renaming a memorized report now works properly.
• The QuickReport option is now available for all accounts in the Chart of

  Accounts List.

• Invalid characters are no longer displayed in reports when the Company >

  Company Settings > Transactions > Use account numbers setting is used.

Lists

• Custom sorted lists now retain their custom sort order in pop-up menus.

  The Re-sort List option is now available for all lists.

Sales receipts and invoices

• Viewing all sales receipts using the Enter Sales Receipt window’s Prev button

  is now properly handled.

• An issue with unexpected QuickBooks behavior when deleting an invoice

  after round-tripping a file to QuickBooks for Windows with the audit trail

  turned on has been resolved.

Payments

• The Receive Payments window no longer constantly reverts back to today’s

  date.

• Applying a partial payment to multiple invoices is now properly handled.

PayCycle

• An issue with unexpected QuickBooks behavior when trying to save the Edit

  State Tax Information window from within PayCycle has been resolved.

• All vendor information is now imported from PayCycle contractor paychecks.
• An issue with duplicate employees in the Employee List when importing data

  from PayCycle has been resolved.

Other changes

• Accented characters in a company filename are now displayed in the

  Company Settings > Company Information window.

• QuickMath calculations are now properly handled when the setting

  “Automatically place decimal point” is enabled.

• Assigning subaccounts in transactions is now properly handled.
• An issue with unexpected QuickBooks behavior when attempting to add

  1099 status to a vendor has been resolved.

• QuickFill now selects the correct account when the setting “Use Account

  Number” is enabled.

• Changes to the Cost field on an inventory item are now properly retained.
• An issue with unexpected QuickBooks behavior when Contact Sync is turned

  on when previously synced First Name fields are empty has been resolved.

• The font used to display the Reconcile window has changed for easier

  viewing.