Yes, it has now been two years since I paid off my last consumer debt.

This last year Amy & I taught 3 Financial Peace University classes, and mostly just kept plugging along. My net worth went backwards this last 12 months, down $22,885, but that was just the stock market. We are set to pay off our house in less than 15 years, and we have more savings each month.

As I have posted earlier, I hate the phrase "as per". I just found more evidence in favor of my crusade. It's listed on the list of common English errors here: http://wsu.edu/~brians/errors/asper.html

For me it was -36.94%, according to Quicken. If I had followed my desired asset allocation of 10% VBMFX, 67.5% VTSMX, and 22.5% VGTSX, and if I had rebalanced quarterly, and if I had not added any money during the year, I would have seen a return of -35.01%. So I was not too far off.

As you can see from this chart, I was at least above what I had contributed for most every quarter, except for Q4 2008. I am not worried, if the stock marker can drop that quick, it can come back quickly also. Besides, the big growth (as you may be able to see from the chart) will be from my contributions. Starting in Q4 2007 I started adding money like a crazy person.

The NEBR Business Cycle Dating Committee determined that December 2007 was the peak of the last expansion, and a recession began following that. So now what?

That seems to be a question I keep hearing, for example on the WSJ morning radio show, they keep asking people how they are changing their behavior as a result of the recession. Why? The recession is an average of the economy as a whole. Asking how individuals how they are going to change in response would be like asking students how they are going to react to average test scores going down. Oooo average test scores are down in my school, should I study more or less? That would be stupid to even talk about.

Likewise how will I change my behavior? Not at all! I have been very frugal for the last 3 years, and I will continue to save money just the same. Will that pull down the average spending? Perhaps, perhaps not. Do I care? Nope. It's just an average.

There are a few tools that I love for C++ development, and one of them is CxxTest. One of my other favorite tools is the Make Project Creator or MPC. It allows you to generate makefiles or visual studio projects from some simple configuration files.

MPC lets you create templates for various projects that can be used again and again.

Here is my template for CxxTest projects:

project {
  Header_Files {
    *.h
    *.hpp
    ^Test*.hpp
    CxxTest {
      ../cxxtest/cxxtest/*.h
    }
  }
  Define_Custom(CxxTest) {
    automatic = 1
    command = $(PERL_BIN)/perl ../cxxtest/cxxtestgen.pl
    output_option = -o
    inputext = .hpp
    source_outputext = .cpp
    commandflags = --abort-on-fail --have-eh --have-std --part
  }
  CxxTest_Files {
    Test*.hpp
  }
  includes += ../cxxtest ..
}

Then in the folder where your test cases live:

project : CxxTest {
  exename=*
  Source_Files {
    main.cpp
  }
  specific(vc71,vc8) {
    postbuild = $(TargetPath) $(CXX_RUNNER_ARGS)
  }
}

You will have to create the main.cpp file manually, normally it is created with perl ../cxxtest/cxxtestgen.pl --root.