Which method, website, or app do you use for your household monthly budgeting?
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What works for you and how does it work? How long have you been using it?
A piece of paper and guesswork to begin with many years ago.
My bank app has an automated thing that guesses (i can correct it but it's right 90%) what every non cash transaction is and puts it in a category.
I can go back and look through how much things have cost me month by month.
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What works for you and how does it work? How long have you been using it?
I have a rough idea of my outgoings each month as compared to my income and I just make sure I don't spend more than I earn at least most of the time.
My wife occasionally sits down and does a proper budget so we can move around recurring payments and make sure we keep things fair.
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What works for you and how does it work? How long have you been using it?
wrote on last edited by [email protected]None, I just do it in my head. Not that there is much to do in the first place.
It's just logging into online banking and clicking "pay" on all the bills that aren't automated.
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What works for you and how does it work? How long have you been using it?
Not quite budgeting but I use(d) wallos to keep track of my subscriptions (when they are due, how much, who pays it, by what method and some more features).
Very neat.
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I have a rough idea of my outgoings each month as compared to my income and I just make sure I don't spend more than I earn at least most of the time.
My wife occasionally sits down and does a proper budget so we can move around recurring payments and make sure we keep things fair.
probably the wif's methode is better, than guessing.
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What works for you and how does it work? How long have you been using it?
I don't do budgeting, per-se. For personal expenses, the idea of pre-planning everything we're going to spend just seems like overkill. Maybe that's just cause we're not close enough to the poverty line for real financial hardship. But I find a reactive approach works well, rather than proactive.
I keep an accounting ledger that I update every 1-2 weeks. The ledger is just a big Excel (actually LibreOffice Calc) file that I setup with some formulas and pie charts to make it easy to see when expenses are outpacing income, and what our biggest expenses are if we need to cut down for a while (spoilers: it's utilities and food).
I've tried a handful of different free accounting applications in the past, but never found one I liked for the above purposes. I ended up starting a project to make my own, like a year ago, but I haven't gotten around to finishing it. The spreadsheet approach has been working well enough. All the custom app would do is help automate the data entry.
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What works for you and how does it work? How long have you been using it?
A pretty large spreadsheet into which goes all the incomings and outgoings, logged and averaged over 12 months to give a pretty accurate idea of how much disposable income me and my partner will have after all the bills and savings have been calculated.
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What works for you and how does it work? How long have you been using it?
Method: Spend very little. Spend in few places. Use cash.
Results: Stellar. I don't think about it much. I put money aside consistently.
Timeframe: 15 years? Something like that. I had IRS problems, and stripped my life down. Its all clean now, and I keep it that way. -
I have been using Everydollar for a few years, without paying for the bank integration and other stuff. It's from Dave Ramsey
The good:
Free if you don't want bank integration/automatic data pulling
Relatively simple interface
Website based
The Bad:
Assumes a zero-based budget
Tries to force an app if using a mobile device
Sinking funds are implemented in an odd way
I switched from everydollar to actual budget using the envelope method - once you set it up properly and adjust your mindset (money made this month funds next months budget) it has been enlightening. It feels a lot more “real” than the way everydollar works.
The bank sync has been hit or miss for me so I just import csv files from my banks online portal.
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For all this AI BS we're going through, why is there not one to actually automate budgeting. Of all the fucking apps they're shoving down people's throats, the one thing I've been waiting for still hasn't come. Wtf.
I really need it, anything that doesn't automatically pull in transactions reliably, between multiple accounts and reconciles transactions between them (matching a 10.39 transaction on one of my privacy cards to the corresponding bank pull transaction) is just gonna fall apart for me in a matter of months. (At best)
Envelopes, spreadsheets, YNAB, Quicken all have been tried, all got forgotten about -_-
If it's making you so angry, it might be better to just do it yourself.
It'll also help you spend less because you won't want to log all those little transactions
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What works for you and how does it work? How long have you been using it?
wrote on last edited by [email protected]I selfhost ezBookkeeping where I track all non-reoccurring transactions and a LibreOffice Calc sheet where I track all reoccurring transactions. The sheet I've been using for multiple years now and it works great because I can clearly see what amount of money I can spend every month on anything I want and still being able to pay everything I need. The selfhosted app I've only been using since the beginning of the year because I used to use ActualBudget which I had connected to my bank account to automatically fill it will all transactions I did but due to it being automatic and not manual like ezBookkeeping felt like I was loosing track of everything.
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If it's making you so angry, it might be better to just do it yourself.
It'll also help you spend less because you won't want to log all those little transactions
NGL, I've seriously thought about it, but my AI skill set is very much still "in development" and I have tons of other projects to get done on my projects list
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What works for you and how does it work? How long have you been using it?
No one is mentioning gnucash and I think that's beautiful.
My partner and I used a spreadsheet from Google docs "budget template" or something. Moved on to gnucash after we wanted more features. I love it now, but it was a struggle to learn. Also a clunky interface. Also way more complex than we need. But I did once track down a tiny error in one of our bills, saving us a fraction of a dollar after hours of cross-checking!!
(I do love it though; the tradeoff is that we don't have to do repetitive manual entry and duplication of info. Instead, we have extensive notes on how to accomplish what we want!)
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NGL, I've seriously thought about it, but my AI skill set is very much still "in development" and I have tons of other projects to get done on my projects list
I meant just making a spreadsheet and doing it manually. But if you have technical skills, you really just need to make a script that sticks data from your bank's CSV files into a spreadsheet.
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What works for you and how does it work? How long have you been using it?
After years of trying every budgeting app possible (including YNAB) the only app I've found that does everything well is Bluecoins. Split transactions, multiple accounts, handling of credit/debit, recurring transactions, bill reminders, automated reading of bank app notification (to parse transactions), easy reconciliation of accounts, cloud syncing, etc. Definitely well worth the single purchase price (fuck subscription pricing models).
