We never had a budget, other than the pay yourself first and the rest is free game variety. That kind of works for it's purpose (FIRE) in that we are now saving about 2/3 of our income and have a pretty good idea how much our monthly expenses are in total to make a reasonable guess at retirement income needs.
However this year when the reality of impending ER really hit home (aiming for end of year) we decided to do some simple budgeting and expense tracking just to put our minds at ease a bit more on what our needs are for monthly income and where we could cut back if the **** hit the fan.
Ended up using http://www.inexfinance.com since it was free, it isn't the fanciest and we don't use any of the "connect an account" features and we aren't even doing the entire budget just categories that are harder to pin down like food, entertainment, personal care, booze, etc. I've found I kind of enjoy entering expenses and looking at the overview to know whether we're ahead or behind in certain categories. One thing I've struggled with is retail stuff, so much can be bought at our grocery store and I'm not willing to go the extra mile necessary to partition out food vs. something like candles or batteries or ac filter or whatever.
Bottom line = if it is free and doesn't take that much time, why not?
However this year when the reality of impending ER really hit home (aiming for end of year) we decided to do some simple budgeting and expense tracking just to put our minds at ease a bit more on what our needs are for monthly income and where we could cut back if the **** hit the fan.
Ended up using http://www.inexfinance.com since it was free, it isn't the fanciest and we don't use any of the "connect an account" features and we aren't even doing the entire budget just categories that are harder to pin down like food, entertainment, personal care, booze, etc. I've found I kind of enjoy entering expenses and looking at the overview to know whether we're ahead or behind in certain categories. One thing I've struggled with is retail stuff, so much can be bought at our grocery store and I'm not willing to go the extra mile necessary to partition out food vs. something like candles or batteries or ac filter or whatever.
Bottom line = if it is free and doesn't take that much time, why not?
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