Well, I don't have any problem coding, but I've been learning how to budget and so far, the best tool is Quicken. arg! I want more than simply tracking my finances and generating alerts when a budget item is exceeded. I'm a monitoring engineer and what quicken, mint, and gnucash and all of them do is simply "monitoring". you collect the data, set a threshold, and then react. There's some reports, but they're all simple charts, nothing statistical.

I want to predict; I want to use the tool to help me make my decisions, find the shortest path, etc. And I'm not talking about stock market prediction, either. Just simple stuff like: Given 12 months history, how much should I budget for my Gas & electric bill? What's the variance for a budget item? Are there patterns in my spending? What's the best snowball scenario, and how much can I redirect to paying down debt?

I don't need to replace stuff that Mint does, I just want to do some intelligent budgeting. There are a few spreadsheets out there that help with snowball, but they're cumbersome.

So I'm thinking I need to start by learning some basics of financial programming. I remember classes I took (very long time ago) where the examples were always financial applications. Being young and stupid, I thought "I'll never need this stuff" so I paid attention to the code and forgot the technique. Now that I actually have money, I want to put my skills to it!

Anyway, I was hoping that someone knew of something (book, course, code) that specifically deals with money management.