Looking for Advice

[c9]

As I've complained already, houses are expensive, etc etc. I need to more carefully track my money than I have in the past, and I'm looking for suggestions on what tools / approaches you fantastically intelligent friends of mine use.

Basically, the spreadsheet method I use will demand too much effort for too little return. I'd like to track two accounts containing about 4-5 piles of money each. As we spend money on (for example) the electricity bill, I want to track how that pile of electricity bill money is changing.

I may just build an insane spreadsheet, but I figure there's gotta be a better way. Is there?

Comments

[thespos]

I've used MS Money, which usually starts out okay, but it requires a lot of attention over time. That's just me, tho.

You can enter as many accounts you like, as many bills as you like, both recurring and non-recurring, and it will project trends on some things.

[nihilicious.livejournal.com]

I currently have $30 in the bank. I got my bonus this month and decided it would be a good time to pay down a load of debt, etc. I totally went overboard, and now I have to pack lunches for the rest of the week.

I am not a role model, is what I'm saying.

[primary-suspect.livejournal.com]

We just use the spreadsheet method. We have rows for different budget items and we add amounts into it each month from our income. When we pay an electricity bill we subtract the amount so we can always see how much we have in each "pile" so what we can afford to spend.

It is harder to track trends and stuff that way but easy to see if you are over spending or what you have available at any given time.

[sassy-red-head.livejournal.com]

We use the 'envelope' method. We have an envelope for each expense.
-mortgage
-groceries
-pet stuff
-insurance
-car
-hydro
-water
-gas
-household needs (toilet paper, cleaning supplies)
-emergency

etc.

Grab your latest bills and round them up to the nearest $10.

We split things up where I pay all the utilities and Brent pays all the car and insurance stuff.

The rest we split and put money into each envelope whenever we get paid. Since we rounded the bills up, there's a buffer for anything that is unaccounted for.


Any money that doesn't get put into an envelope is used to pay down existing debt (minus a reasonable amount of spending money).

This works for us.

[evad-cgy.livejournal.com]

Quicken is the only route to go... after you've assigned a transaction (credit/debit) once it remembers how you've categorized it...
Plus it allows you to budget, and run reports to see how you're doing

One down side... it's expensive :(

[simplisticton.livejournal.com]

I'm still addicted to Ultrasoft Checkbook. It's been the killer app for the Palm for me for the last couple of years. I track our joint accounts, my personal chequing account (now thankfully reduced to one), my savings accounts, and my liabilities.

It has a budget module that allows you to track your spending against various categories and sub-categories. It has some simple reports built-in and there's a Windows/Mac app to extract the data from the Palm into a CSV file you can import into Excel for more analysis. There's also a more expensive version of Checkbook that syncs with MS Money.

Quicken/GNUCash/MS Money are all very powerful programs, but you have to be willing to account their way, and they can be a time sink to do it right. The beauty of Checkbook is that it's really just that -- a checkbook -- and while it lacks some of the powerful features of the big boys it's also easy to use.

Since it's on my Palm, I can enter expenses as I make them, and it allows me to pull up my financial situation and model what-if's on the fly.