What works for you and how does it work? How long have you been using it?
I just use an Excel spreadsheet, but I use OpenOffice instead of Microsoft Office.
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.
https://actualbudget.org/ with the envelope system.
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 -_-
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.
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.
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.
I started using a spreadsheet in 2010. Expenses down the left ordered by due date. Paydays across the top. Months framed and colored.
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.
I’ve been using an open-source app xaalled Eqonomize!. Before that I was doing something similar, but with spreadsheets.
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.
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 use a spreadsheet, following the method outlined in this deck. I’d be happy to answer any questions you have about it. https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1KWMaKKUYPGuuxnQa10Yfzryy5JQsplmvhVtGbajm9is/
Updated to add, I’ve been using this method for about 20 years at this point and it has worked well across a variety of employment and family situations, including when I was doing shift work that varied seasonally, unemployed, and in a multi-family household. Knowing what my monthly burn rate is and being able to easily experiment with different scenarios by copying my budget to a new tab is so useful.
Since most expenses are static but my income is variable, I have done the calculation for how much my expenses are per day and per week. Then I just make sure I’m making at least that much every workday / workweek. All the surplus gets split between discretionary spending, long-term plans (home improvement, family trips), and investments.
I’ve managed to make it even simpler by making the investments automatic and hands-off, so I can just figure those into the per-week number since they’re also regular.
Google Sheets. I don’t do line item budgeting though. I create my overall plan in Sheets so I know what transfers to set up and that it doesn’t exceed my income and I just look at Monarch Money to see how my spending is going. It’s $100 a year and a pretty good app.
