Household Budgeting

Anyone have any favourite software programs to help me keep a budget organized? My wife and I have been using the jar system since going through a consumer proposal last year (yay...) and that has been successful I kinda want to have more of a numbers on screen/paper kinda deal. With me getting a full time permanent teaching gig late last year we have a little more flexibility but I'd feel more comfortable being able to arrange/organize things on screen.

tldr; any budgeting programs out there that you like? Anything to be avoided?
 
[Free] Mint.com (and the similar FinanceWorks, which some banks and credit unions provide it as a complementary product) is a great online tool by Intuit. It can automatically pull all the activity on your different financial services (e.g. savings, debit/credit accounts, investments, ...) and let you have a very efortless look into your finances. It also minimizes the chance you'll miss an erroneous charge or withdrawal on one of your accounts. Any cash transactions have to, of course, be entered manually. It has budgeting capabilities that are very basic but sufficient if you're already budget-minded.

[$50/year] YNAB is often recommended, it has grown into a much beefier product (from its humbler slightly-better-than-a-spreadsheet times) to a very robust tool. I have been told it does everything Mint does, but better (no idea how true that is). It moved from a fixed price to a yearly subscription, but people generally effing love it. I have yet to try it, because it doesn't offer anything I need over my current tools. The old YNAB 4 ($60) has less features, but the price-tag is firm and one-time. You might want to google "YNAB 4 vs new" and see what the comparison is like.

[Free] MS Excel/Google Sheets/LibreOffice Calc. This requires manually inputting everything (like the old old YNAB), but that makes you spending-averse, and very conscious about your expenses due to the inherent time commitment. This is great if you have more time than financial skills... Though then again you could spend the extra time saved with proper software watching budgeting/finance videos at Khan Academy or somesuch. There's great pre-made budget books for every spreadsheet software out there, just gotta search for them. I know Excel is not free, but the alternatives are... And it's an offline-only product anyway :ninja:
 
I literally just use a pair of text files. One acts as my substitute register, and the other is a reminder of all the recurring payments I have just so I don't inadvertently forget about one when planning/paying.

No matter what method you use, the important part is keeping at it and keeping it up to date so you're right on top of trends and don't get surprised by anything. There is nothing that will save you if you refuse to use it.

--Patrick
 
A notebook with monthly expenses and a rather old copy of Quicken.
I use Quicken also, but I have to update it every 2 years or my bank stops allowing me to download transactions directly into it.

Quicken has budgeting and the like, but I don't use it. Maybe I should look into it, but I never have because my method works for me and only takes 15 minutes or so a month to do.

I have all of my "fixed" costs (credit card payments, house payments, insurance, cars, etc) and paychecks (which are also a fixed amount) set as bill reminders. Near the end of the month, I enter in all of the next month's bill reminders, which gives me a look at how much free money I have in the upcoming month for all of my variable costs (groceries, gas, etc).

Since my variable costs are somewhat stable (we spend about the same amount every month on groceries, for instance) I now have a pretty good idea of how much free money I'll have in the upcoming month that I can use for entertainment, debt reduction, etc. And I can see which weeks I'll be lower on cash and when my cash surpluses are, allowing me to schedule any extra spending when I'm flush.
 
We use the "swipe the card until it rejects" method.

We've tried spreadsheets, Mint, and Everydollar.

I liked mint and everydollar, but we're super lazy and stopped using them after a few months.

We really need to, but it's a pain in the ass, and we're lazy AF.
 
I've stopped "using" mint, and moved over to Personal Capital, but that's really more for seeing where everything is not where it's going (although I think you can budget with it). Found it faster and preferred the interface to mint's.

One of the perks of being single I guess :foreveralone: is my finances aren't as complex as a family's because there's only one output.
 
I've stopped "using" mint, and moved over to Personal Capital, but that's really more for seeing where everything is not where it's going (although I think you can budget with it). Found it faster and preferred the interface to mint's.

One of the perks of being single I guess :foreveralone: is my finances aren't as complex as a family's because there's only one output.
Maybe it's because I tried it near the beginning, but I found Personal Capital to have a lot of issues connecting to various banks/accounts. Intuit's stuff craps out very rarely, and in 1 of 20-ish accounts, while on PC it was struggling with a full third of my stuff. Might be time to give it another whirl.
 
I don't understand how you are all perfectly fine with giving some 3rd party app access to your bank accounts and stuff. I'll do it by hand, thanks.
 
That's why I do notebook and Quicken. I get the info from my CU's website and track it that way.

Sent from my Nextbook on Tapatalk
 

GasBandit

Staff member
I don't understand how you are all perfectly fine with giving some 3rd party app access to your bank accounts and stuff. I'll do it by hand, thanks.
Intuit (the company behind Quicken and Mint) has a reputation that helps me trust them more than I would, say, a random startup. At least insofar as not deliberately misusing my information.

As for the other security issues inherent in sharing usernames and passwords, Mint takes some extra steps.
 
Top