Kristi and I have found a useful tool for tracking our monthly budget.
Obviously, there are a lot of different approaches and tools that support those, such as software that connects to your bank and credit cards directly and track your transactions. My concern with that approach is that it usually takes a couple of days for those transactions to show up, so my budget view from such a tool would always be a couple of days behind.
I found an app called Toshl that I really like. It is available for iPhone (which we don't use), Android (which Kristi uses), and Windows Phone 7 (which I use). Using this tool I was able to create monthly budgets for each of our budget categories, then each time we spend money on anything, we can enter the expense quickly from our phones and assign it to an expense tag, which is associated with one of the budgets (budgets can have multiple expense tags assigned.) The app syncs data with my online account, so we see the same view from all phones or online. The phone and online apps also let me look at the amounts left in each budget category. So far we have found it very useful. The apps and online service are free, but you have to pay $20.00 per year in order to create multiple budgets (for a free account, you can track all of your expenses against different expense tags, but all deduct from the same common monthly budget). I thought it was useful enough to pay the $20.00 to get unlimited budget categories. I am hopeful that this tool will help us to be able to have the data to make better decisions about our expenses, in fact for me this is the first app besides email that actually seems useful enough to me to justify my having a smart phone.
I'd love to hear about other budget tracking tools that you have found useful.
That does sound really useful. We use a program called simply "Budget" that uses the "envelope" method of budgeting (where you put money into a category, and then it stays there month to month if you don't spend it). We've really liked it, and we've been using it for about six and a half years, so we kind of have a lot of history with it. It does have an iPhone app, but since we don't have a smart phone, we don't know how good it is. We typically enter our purchases about once per week, so it would be nice to enter them as you go with a smart phone.
ReplyDeleteI use mint.com, but I don't find it very useful. I'm not perfect at it yet, but I think I like physical envelopes with real money inside best. It doesn't require any record keeping, which I tend to not be very vigilant about.
ReplyDeleteWe're huge fans of Mint. It was really easy to set up all our accounts and Mint automatically updates them. I'm not too worried about the lag, things usually seem to show up later that day or the next, and I'd never have the patience to enter any purchases manually.
ReplyDeleteI just like to know that we are staying within budget. It sends alerts when you go over on a budget, which makes it easy to just stop spending in that category. It's also pretty easy to select whether budgets roll over or not, so when you go over on a budget, you have to spend less the next month to get back in line.
We also really like using mint. Transaction show up as soon as they are processed, so the only lag is how long the company purchasing from take to process the transaction.
ReplyDeleteMint sounds interesting - I should try it. I wanted something that I could use easily from my phone, and Mint hasn't yet made an app for the one true smart phone OS :).
ReplyDeletewe looked at mint.com, but it forces everything to happen on a monthly based budget, and our budget is based on 2 weeks. In the end we ended up using gnu cash, because it was free and allowed us to budget the way we wanted.
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