I’m tired of running my personal finances by the seat of pants, playing check balance roulette every time I pay a bill. (Fortunately, I’ve never bounced a payment, but I bet I’ve come close.)
The problem is largely laziness on my part. I’m sure I could track every penny and schedule every bill-pay using a pencil-and-paper system or even an Excel spreadsheet, but I’m not really in the mood to reinvent a wheel which I suspect already exists out there.
I’m looking for a very basic home budget tracking program – something that will tally my deposits and subtractions, and alert me to the due dates and amounts of upcoming bills. I’m not doing high finance here, so I don’t need a whole lot of bells and whistles.
Dopers, does such a thing exist (preferably for free, btw) and, if so, could you suggest a particular brand?
Go to this blog and scroll down until you are almost to the bottom. On the right-hand column will be a link to Crazy Aunt Purl’s Budget Worksheet. It’s simple, it’s free, it’s Excel, and probably no alerts, so maybe not what you are looking for, but she worked in finance…don’t be thrown by the cats and knitting. She’s a published author! Someone else will be along soon with the perfect thing, I’m sure!
I almost didn’t answer this, it frustrated me so…do you know that when I went to school, if you were caught using a calculator you got an automatic F? and you want something EASY?
It’s called WRITE IT DOWN. get a notebook at the dollar store and start writing down your expenses, then subtract it from what you have.
Then, pare that down.
That’s your budget.
Welcome to the real world.
Just heard about this website on a radio interview with an author who has written a financial planning book aimed at women. She recommended this site (among others) as a good resource.
Yeah, welcome to the future. Nothing wrong with a paper budget, but there’s problems there too, and there’s no reason to eschew some newer tools that can improve accuracy.
To OP: if you’re not familiar with it, I highly recommend checking out mint.com. It’s not a budgeting tool per se, but it allows you to track and categorize your actual expenditures very nicely. It’s an excellent resource for creating and monitoring your budget.
It does a lot of what you’re asking for, including alerts. Last I looked, it doesn’t allow preplanning very well (you couldn’t schedule expected deposits / spending for estimated future budgets), but I’ve heard there’s improvements there.
You also might want to check out PNC’s Virtual Wallet bank accounts. It’s a brilliantly designed system that provides you with two checking accts and a savings acct, all built on a system that allows you to automate movement between all three, gives you really clear views of them, and includes budget planning elements. That said, the actual rates aren’t as good as the competition and there’s plenty of good ol’ fees involved.
My personal preference is using Ally bank (formerly GMAC) who have dead-simple, low-fee accts and using Mint to emulate some of VW’s features. It’s not perfect, though – mint can’t MOVE your money, so setting up movement between accounts isn’t as easy.
I know you said in your OP that ou weren’t that thrilled about building your own Excel spreadsheet, but it’s worked well for me. I’ll simply note that “lazy” and “thrifty” rarely fit well together.
Another vote for Mint.com. I have used it for a few months and although it makes me a bit paranoid when I have a low-ish balance, I need that to keep my spending in check.
This free excel worksheet calculators for calculating electricity bill, home budget calculator and educational budget calculator for free download to help in managing the cost spend by a person.
I use Gnu Cash. It’s free and is fairly powerful, though I found it a bit unintuitive for some things. Once you get used to its quirks it works pretty well. I haven’t tried to do any alerts with it, but you can set up recurring and scheduled transactions on it.
It’s not an entire budget, but manilla.com is a pretty fantastic program that tracks your various bills/balances/etc. and will send you alerts when a balance is low or a bill due. Read their About page for more information, but it’s worked well for me to keep track of things without much effort.
I am madly in love with You Need a Budget. It is a brilliant piece of software. It’s not free - sixty bucks - but it’s well worth it. They just came out with an upgrade which improves on the already great original.
YNAB is unlike any other financing software out there. It allows you to track and reconcile all your accounts, but the focus is largely on the budget - how much money you allocate each month to various expense categories. You can see at a glance how much you’ve spent in that category and how much you have left to spend (there is a phone app now that lets you do this on the go and automatically syncs to your account.) If you go over the amount budgeted for a specific category, it just subtracts that amount from the total amount of money you have to budget next month. The idea is you put every single dollar you have to use, whether it’s savings or buying food.
Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant.
They have free webinars teaching you how to use it (highly reccomended because they teach you a lot of things you wouldn’t have figured out on your own.) They also have a 10-day e-mail course. Excellent customer service.
Old thread, but in the same spirit as You Need A Budget, we’re die-hard Quicken users. Yes, the tool has its drawbacks such as the forced “upgrade” every 3 years (if you want to keep using transaction downloads, that is), but it does a FANTASTIC job with planning expected expenses, and tracking where all the money goes.
That said, it’s not free. I’ve tried mint.com and not found it that useful, though I gather it’s improved some. The big handicap for us is that there’s no way to tie it to the Quicken history (they’re both owned by Intuit), and I’ve got 13 years of data in Quicken.
You have to understand, I’m not one of those people born for personal finance. Not constantly spending money is a challenge for me. My husband had been tracking everything in Excel, then we decided to manage our finances as a team, so we tried Gnu cash. He was just fine with it, but I hated it with the burning heat of a thousand suns. I’m already at a handicap, and the software itself is really not user-friendly at all. And it’s boring. It’s just boring.
I tried Mint for myself personally, and it was cool at first, but it really didn’t encourage me to really track my spending… it’s one of those things you can set and leave and come back at the end of the month and say, “Shit, I spent HOW much on underwater basketweaving supplies?”
So I talked him into YNAB. He was skeptical at first, but then he saw what a difference it made for tracking our spending, and he saw how very happy I was to have a neat, user-friendly interface, and now I think we both feel we couldn’t live without it. IIRC we’ve had it about six months now, and we are no longer bleeding money.
This isn’t a very old thread so hopefully a bump is ok.
I’ve been playing with mint.com but my problem is I have a number of accounts that mint.com apparently can’t reach. The most notable are an annuity from my union, and one of my two retirement accounts through work (it can access the pension, but not the deferred compensation/457). Now I am questioning whether there is any point for me? it seems like most people who like it are trying to learn to live in a budget, saving for some specific goal, or reducing debt.
Is there anyone using mint.com and finding it worthwhile, who doesn’t have any particular savings goals, has no debt, and has zero need of financial advice?
Also, once you have your banking info set up, can it recognize direct deposits as income? If I have to enter income manually every paycheck, then fuckit.