Partly cloudy and breezy right now. Winds will pick up this afternoon.

We are in the direct path of the hurricane's eye as predicted by NOAA. At 7 a.m. the storm's center will pass right over us.

Our Road to Black is located near Houston, Texas, which means we are under a hurricane warning from Hurricane Ike. I will post updates on the storm in this space.

Our house is far from the areas in danger from the storm surge and is located high off the street, so flooding danger is as minimal as possible. This was not an accident; we intentionally sought a home that would be safe from water. I am concerned about the wind, though, because there are a lot of trees in our neighborhood and they haven't been trimmed in a while.

Stay tuned. Better yet, subscribe.

This is a sponsored link, but it's a pretty good deal if you are looking for shelving. I recommend you only make a purchase if you are already planning to buy shelving — an impulse purchase won't help you on your own Road to Black.

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You will have to pay shipping, but as I said recently, online shopping still can cost less than in-store shopping because it cuts down on those little impulse purchases.

Since I took over responsibility for bill paying, I used the old-fashioned pencil-and-paper method. Tracking our expenses and income was new to me, and I felt more comfortable and "in control" when I held the pencil in my hand. I knew the feeling was an illusion — there's nothing about a pencil, as opposed to a computer program, that gives more control — but it was nice to have.

A couple of months ago, I decided the time had come to upgrade and start using financial software. I had already consigned the pen and checkbook to the past, replacing them with online bill paying from my bank's website.

The software I settled on was GNUcash. I was attracted by the fact that it is open-source — and free.

GNUcash uses double-entry accounting, also called two-column accounting, which is different from the simple category system used by other financial applications. Each entry in an account has a corresponding and opposite entry in another account. For example, if I paid a utility bill in the amount of $100.00 from my main checking account, it would be deducted from that account as an expense; but it would also be added to an expense account.

Here is a shot of the page for my checking account with the $100.00 bill. See that the money is recorded as a withdrawal and noted as a "transfer" to another account, in this case to Utilities. Since this is an expense type of account, the transfer column refers to it as "Expenses:Utilities".



At the top of the page are tabs for each account. The left tab labeled Accounts lists all of them, and the user chooses which ones to open and look at. If I open the Utilities account, this is what I see:



Instead of Deposit and Withdrawal, the corresponding columns are called Expense and Rebate, but they amount to the same thing. If my utility company credited money back to my checking account, I would record it in the checking account tab as a deposit, and it would show in the Utilities tab in the Rebate column.

On paper, double-entry accounting would require typing in an entry twice, but GNUcash automatically makes the record in the second account as soon as you save it in the first account. I could just as easily save the record in the Utilities account if I liked, and it would be recorded automatically in the Checking account.

Split transactions are possible in GNUcash, too.

Although I have heard many people, first-year accounting students among them, complain about double-entry accounting as confusing, I find it intuitive. I like it better than a "categories" system.

I love Babies 'R' Us.

I browse the baby care, clothing, and toy sections every time I go in. I just can't help it; I love baby things.

Unfortunately, I can't get out of the store without dropping at least a C-note — even if the item I was shopping for costs ten or twenty dollars. At the baby superstore, my impulses always get the better of my budget.

Big-box department stores are worse. I don't enjoy the shopping experience as much, but I still end up overspending every time I go in. Travis at The Simple Dollar recently explained why.

I do not have trouble with impulse shopping when I shop online, though. As much as online retailers try, they have a hard time getting to me; my tendency to add things to the shopping cart impulsively seems tied to my ability to hold and feel objects.

So lately, whenever I have to buy a specialty baby item, as I just did for a baby bath seat, I skip the brick and mortar stores and go straight to the Internet. I hate to pay shipping, but it's a lot less than the extra money I would spend at the superstore.

Image credit: basykes on Flickr. Some rights reserved.

I recently came across an article with the provocative title "How I Stole Someone's Identity," in which a baby-faced computer security professor details how he broke into the online accounts (with permission, all in the name of science) of a hapless acquaintance named Kim. He didn't use any programming skills or esoteric techniques — only search engines and cleverness. Here are three lessons I learned from his article:

1. Be aware of what personal information you share online. Blog posts, myspace pages, and even web forums can be sources of personal information for identity thieves to mine. Paranoia isn't necessary, but remember that not everyone who accesses the Internet is your friend.

2. Don't use personal information to safeguard your identity. Once information is posted on the web, you should assume it cannot be removed, thanks to caches and mirror sites. (For example, when something is "deleted" from Wikipedia by an administrator, it is really just protected from viewing. It can later be restored by any administrator.) Your phone number, your pet's name, your mother's maiden name, and above all your date of birth: none of these are private enough to be the basis of your online security.

3. Keep your e-mail passwords at maximum security. E-mail password security has to be your top priority because your e-mail account is the key to the rest of your online accounts. In the article, e-mail was the key to all of Kim's accounts because most sites reset passwords via e-mail. Security Focus has a great article on password-security best practices.

And here is a bonus tip that was not addressed in the article:

4. Be aware of sites that do not encrypt your password. If you receive (or can ask for) an e-mail with your password in it, then that site does not encrypt your password. Your password cannot be retrieved if it is encrypted, which is why most sites will reset your password but not send it to you. StumbleUpon is one major site that does not encrypt passwords.

Do you have any stories about a stolen online identity? Are there any tips you would like to share for keeping your accounts secure?

The Road to Black won a silver medal at this week's Carnival of Debt Reduction! Check out the carnival to view other great posts on reducing your debt.