Budgeting software recommendation

[Tailgate]

I've used YNAB (You Need A Budget) for 5 or 6 years. The older classic version was perfect for me.. the current version..not so much. The lack of reporting/printing options for expense categories/payees is frustrating.

Having searched and read previous threads about software, an update from users of the various platforms might be worthwhile.

My goal is to simply track expenses vs budget, historically and future looking. I only have a little more than a dozen categories. I round off expenses and don't track pennies. I'm not interested in tax, investment tracking or bank reconciliation... just basic spending vs budget with a few useful reports.

Interested in thoughts about Moneydance and Buxters. I'll probably revisit Mint to see what's changed. I realize I might need a somewhat powerful program that I just adjust to my simple needs and go down the road. Pricing consideration is relative to the usefulness of the software.

Any thoughts, tips or help is appreciated...

 

[bgyt]

I’m in the same boat. Looking for recommendations. Like you I opened up mint again. It has tags for setting up a couple different tailored expense groups but then you can’t get any of the outputs filtered on these tags. Or not that I could resolve. Looking for a good program app to help me clarify my real expenses as I finalize pre-retirement specifics.

 

[kgtest]

I use a spreadsheet, google sheets. Four columns

Column 1 is the Label. Column2 is this year's numbers, column3 is last years numbers and column4 is the SavingsOppurtunity if I were to trim the budget.

The hard part of a budget is combing through all of your transactions.

I include eveything from clothing to daycare, diapers to gifts and travel. The best budget is the most-inclusive budget.


Back when I was bad at budgets, I was really bad at tracking my spending and bad with expectations. The more realistic the budget and expectations, the easier it is to track and follow.

My process is this.
1. Export all txn from Bank / Credit cards
2. Categorize each txn
3. Group the categories
4. Compare each category to last years to see where I am spending more vs where I was spending less last year. For instance I saw that I spent like $300 on tacos in Q1...yeah, I know right. But hey I stopped buying Tacos so I figure I saved myself $900. I gotta get those calories somewhere so now Its ice cream

This method gives me a rough idea of my personal inflation. No programs needed...just some youtube videos on how to use Sheets to SUM and a quarterly process to download the txn, cleanup the sheet of data and "run the numbers".

Honestly before the budget I wanted to know "what's my YTD return" as this forum members kept reporting...that pushed me to learn google sheets and now there's no turning back.

I made pivot charts of data. Not just for budgets but I made an entire sheet that gives me a very holistic view of my financial situation.

It gives me working days remaining, % of life remaining, A thermometor graph that gets filled in as my debt decreases, showing me my "debt temperature", a bar graph comparing Gains year over year vs plan, so I can easily see I am ahead of plan. This data all aggregates to one big thermometer that shows my % vs plan.

What this gives me is a visual, and reminds me if I am below plan by say 4% that my quality of life will decrease by 4% or I will have to work harder, or take on more investment risk to make-up for that. Pictures are worth thousands of words.

 

[Jerry1]

I would go with a spreadsheet. If you’re worried about setting it up, my guess is that there are simple templates available. Heck, maybe kgtest will give you his. As for programs, Quicken is the way to go, but since they went to a subscription plan, it may not be worth the expense for your simplified needs. I’m thankful to have an older version and plan on riding that one into the sunset as long as I can make it work, then shift over to a spreadsheet.

 

[easysurfer]

I use an old budgeting program (runs on Windows) called Budget Advisor which I'm holding onto with my cold dead hands as long as I have a budget. What I like is the program just does budgeting. Doesn't try to balance my checkbook, keep track of investments or download back information. There is printing and reports with this program, but I don't print out reports. Instead just view on screen. Also, budgets are year by year and not cumulative. But works fine for me as my only interest is only present year. I save previous years budget files but hardly ever look back at them.

Liked so much that purchased a copy years ago and am glad that I did as looks like the developer is no longer around. Trial version still may be around on internet. I'm not sure if the trial version has function and time limitations or is by the honor system like the good old days of shareware.

I like this program so much that this was the deal breaker reason why on a newer PC, I decided to stay in Windows for my main computer.

 

[trapperjohn]

Mint.com is free and very good at downloading txns, catigorizing, and reporting. And it's free.

 

[pjigar]

Mint.com is free and very good at downloading txns, catigorizing, and reporting. And it's free.

I would not use any account aggregation site that does not have multi factor authentication. Does mint have multi factor authentication? In my book, a text message received on the cell phone does not count as multifactor if you can have login app on the phone since both password and text are on the same device.

I use bank of America's "My Accounts" which is similar to mint.com. The bank of America offers a one time password generating device that you can carry in your wallet for $25 once time fee.

PS: BoA app lets you use text message for one time password but account aggregation (My Accounts) feature is not available on the cell phone app which is a good thing due to the reason I explained above.

 

[RonBoyd]

Yikes!

Also, just google "what are the best budgeting tools and apps"

FWIW, if you are real serious about this, Moneydance is the way to go.

 

[brett]

Sounds like a lot of work to me. Ours takes less than five minutes a month. I simply look at my bank account. Add up all the payments and the cash withdrawals. End of. All I care about is the after tax burn rate. Does not matter if we spend more on food, less on gas from month to month or year to year. It is what it is. We are not going to eat less, drive less etc if the numbers increase YOY, or the opposite for that matter.

 

[target2019]

Sounds like a lot of work to me. Ours takes less than five minutes a month. I simply look at my bank account. Add up all the payments and the cash withdrawals. End of. All I care about is the after tax burn rate. Does not matter if we spend more on food, less on gas from month to month or year to year. It is what it is. We are not going to eat less, drive less etc if the numbers increase YOY, or the opposite for that matter.

This is similar to what we do. It helps to have a CC dedicated to a category. Like we know what goes in the auto each month by that card.
All bills are paid thru 2 checking accounts, and we just download those transactions to excel and assign categories. At end of year I make a summary sheet for future reference.

 

[Tailgate]

Sounds like a lot of work to me. Ours takes less than five minutes a month. I simply look at my bank account. Add up all the payments and the cash withdrawals. End of. All I care about is the after tax burn rate. Does not matter if we spend more on food, less on gas from month to month or year to year. It is what it is. We are not going to eat less, drive less etc if the numbers increase YOY, or the opposite for that matter.

Interesting and simple approach. I'm between the opposites of super simple to detailed. I just want expenses and income on a running basis. I think it's part habit (from pre-fire days of constant analysis) and part feeling in control over the numbers. It took awhile to get my DW in the habit of providing her receipts and expense numbers which she now does automatically. I would hate to fall back to the devil-may-care spending habits. We were never as frugal as most on the forum and are lucky to have done enough things right to be able to enjoy it now.

As OP, a followup on my choice of software... I'm back to Mint after many years. I have set up all accounts, cards and investments but have yet to set up the budget module.

 

[audreyh1]

Spreadsheet here.

I use Quicken to track, but I would export to a spreadsheet to go any further.

Back in the old days I did use Quicken to track against a budget.

These days I just export annual expenses from a Quicken report to a spreadsheet and give it a look over.

 

[ejman]

I use Quicken 2010 because I like the way the budget generation works. The program gives you the choice of automatically loading last years data to generate a new monthly budget, or one can apply a monthly average or manually enter individual budget amounts as needed. I also like that Quicken 2010 works well with Linux and I don't have to do the subscription model as with the current version of Quicken.

 

[easysurfer]

I use Quicken 2010 because I like the way the budget generation works. The program gives you the choice of automatically loading last years data to generate a new monthly budget, or one can apply a monthly average or manually enter individual budget amounts as needed. I also like that Quicken 2010 works well with Linux and I don't have to do the subscription model as with the current version of Quicken.

Quicken and Linux? Just got my attention .

 

[ejman]

Quicken and Linux? Just got my attention .

Yeah, Quicken 2010 runs just fine under Wine (Dunno about other versions of Quicken). I use the playonlinux GUI for Wine.

 

[easysurfer]

Yeah, Quicken 2010 runs just fine under Wine (Dunno about other versions of Quicken). I use the playonlinux GUI for Wine.

Ah, I see. I was thinking maybe there was a native Linux version of Quicken out there. Really made my ears perk up .

 

[W2R]

I use a spreadsheet

Me too. I track my spending in Excel. Well, actually in its free equivalent, Open Office.

Within the workbook I have a spreadsheet for each year, with the spending during each successive month of the year just below the prior month. My columns are: date, category, subcategory, amount, and details. Each time I spend money it's a new row. At the end of each month, I add up the categories and put the totals for that month in my yearly spending by category, off to the side at the top.

This takes me about 5 minutes a day, and a (leisurely) hour or so at the end of each month. I love the flexibility that using my own spreadsheets provides and I love not being constrained by pre-made categories that don't fit my own personal lifestyle, for example. But mostly I am kind of an Excel nut and also an extreme individualist, so I get a big kick out of doing this via spreadsheets. I tried (and hate) both Quicken and YNAB. YMMV and if spreadsheets do not appeal to you, then maybe you'd be happier with the constraints you will experience using canned software.

 

[nuisance]

I'm still using the old stand-alone YNAB. It works fine, but is pretty slow loading and saving with a lot of history. I wish there was something better (stand-alone) that has flexible budgeting like YNAB does.

 

[Golden Mean]

Running Linux here. I used to use GnuCash but haven't kept up with it.

Decided to turn over a new leaf (tracking spending and creating a budget) and I'm trying Homebank this time. Giving it a brief run through, it looks like it does budgets and some useful reports, which is all I want. I'll let you know how it goes.

Looks like they have a Windows version.

 

[Conundrum]

I tried Mint, Moneyspire, Moneydance, Banktivity 6, and the new YNAB. I ended up with Quicken For mac.

 

[eastnortheast]

I'm still using the old stand-alone YNAB. It works fine, but is pretty slow loading and saving with a lot of history. I wish there was something better (stand-alone) that has flexible budgeting like YNAB does.

I still also use the old YNAB4. Works good for me.

Just lost about 6 years of data due to a computer glitch. (Long story, though it was backed up (use time machine, etc), but it wasn't. )

At this point, I have a good feel for what our budget is/was, so losing all the data is more of a loss from an historical perspective than a tangible loss.

In any case, you can set up a new YNAB budget every year and that will minimize the size.

 

[PatrickA5]

As a couple of others have commented, I use Quicken to track expenses and spreadsheets to calculate actual vs. budget. But, I'm not sure why I have a budget at all, since I don't seem to change spending habits. According to my spreadsheet, I'm already $9K over budget YTD for all expenses, but I'm not changing my spending based on this "knowledge". Besides, the actual expense are the correct number - the budget was just wrong.

 

[RE2Boys]

I am still using MS Money for budgeting and investment tracking. It's free.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=20738

 

[KCinBAMA]

... But, I'm not sure why I have a budget at all, since I don't seem to change spending habits. According to my spreadsheet, I'm already $9K over budget YTD for all expenses, but I'm not changing my spending based on this "knowledge". Besides, the actual expense are the correct number - the budget was just wrong.

Same for me as well. I just track my spending to estimate future spending and bounce that against future income by creating a cash flow worksheet looking many months/years in the future.