Budget system

[1st*toright]

I'm not expecting to find a free program that will have all of the functionality I want. One of the reasons why I'm doing this now is because we are sort of starting over from scratch. We moved into a new home right before Thanksgiving and we finally sold our previous home. We also are making some major changes to how we manage money and are moving our everyday money to a different bank. We're unhappy with the customer service at our current bank. Those two events happening at the same time makes it the perfect time for us to do this since this is as close to a clean slate as we've had in a long time.

I pay a little less than market for YNAB (they have grandfathered the price I paid originally for my subscription), and it is worth every penny to me. I'm a CPA, but don't have the time to dedicate to manually entering everything (like you, there are certain things that I have to enter manually, but most transactions auto import, and YNAB's first pass at categorizing is pretty accurate, and its super easy to quickly correct categories as I approve the import). I started using YNAB because I wanted to see why we weren't saving more (I was "budgeting" by making sure there was enough in the checking account to cover our monthly spend and putting everything else into savings). YNAB is zero-dollar based budgeting- as money comes in, you allocate it to the category where it will be spent. It takes a little while to get the hang of budgeting this way (rather than saying "I expect to spend $1000 on rent and $500 on groceries", you say "I just got paid $2000, $1000 of that goes to rent, $500 to groceries, $200 to savings and $300 I can spend on jellybeans" or whatever). That means that I now take all of our income and proactively decide how I want to spend it, and put everything in categories. Including savings, travel etc. Sometimes things get moved around after I've done my budget for the pay period, its very flexible, but I can see that by choosing to get random takeout 'cause I didn't feel like cooking, I'm taking money away from being able to have a nice date night with my DH (because there is one line item for "eating out/takeout" in my budget.) I'm more likely to eat scrambled eggs when I'm feeling lazy and enjoy a nice dinner out with that money. There are nice reporting features - I can pull a report that shows my "necessary" spend (mortgage, gas, groceries), the amount we are spending on important extras (the gym, activities for the kids), or everything (including travel and other truly discretionary items).

I know some people don't find the functionality worth the money when they can use excel or a free service, but for me, I know I'm definitely getting value for what I pay. I use credit card points for travel, and therefore have a lot of different cards (see the I love credit cards thread), and there is no way I could keep it all straight without YNAB (and I get way more benefit from my cards than the annual cost of YNAB - setting aside all the other benefits of having a good budgeting system).

 

[angierae]

I pay $50 a year for YNAB and the financial peace of mind it gives me is worth every penny.

 

[Nebraska_Disney]

I used to use Quicken, but realized I could do the same thing (much easier) in Excel. I have a budget set up on a worksheet, which I keep up to date on what are my real expenses each month as well as the allocations I put into other categories (For example, $550 a month in the "food" category). Then, I have a new worksheet for each month where I put expenses in. I don't categorize them, as that does not interest me to do so, but you could easily do this by adding this as another field/column. I use the "auto sum" function to do the math. It works for me, and I can go back month to month and year to year to see where we are not doing as well managing our money and adjust as needed. I have this going back for about 9 years now. Used to do it all on paper prior to this, then went to Quicken, and then Excel.

 

[Jason_V]

I know I'm an outlier, but I create a budget/money workbook every year. I create my own budget pages with graphs, "account registers" for my checking/savings/credit accounts, any 401k/HSA contributions and when they get deposited, net worth pages and more. Everything is handkeyed and I spend maybe an hour a week making sure everything is up to date. That includes balancing accounts.

 

[Nebraska_Disney]

I know I'm an outlier, but I create a budget/money workbook every year. I create my own budget pages with graphs, "account registers" for my checking/savings/credit accounts, any 401k/HSA contributions and when they get deposited, net worth pages and more. Everything is handkeyed and I spend maybe an hour a week making sure everything is up to date. That includes balancing accounts.

Pretty much what I do too

 

[MomToOne]

I know I'm an outlier, but I create a budget/money workbook every year. I create my own budget pages with graphs, "account registers" for my checking/savings/credit accounts, any 401k/HSA contributions and when they get deposited, net worth pages and more. Everything is handkeyed and I spend maybe an hour a week making sure everything is up to date. That includes balancing accounts.

That's sort of like me, although I don't make graphs (LOL) or keep account registers anymore (I have enough "float" money in my accounts at this point to cover anything that goes through, and I just check whenever I login to the banking website to make sure nothing has been taken out of my accounts that shouldn't have.)

But I have spreadsheets galore. One for my annual budget (I budget some things weekly/some monthly/some annually in my own unique way that works best for me). One that helps keep track of my investments and figure out when I am out of balance with my desired asset allocation/what transactions I need to make to get back in balance. One that keeps track of DD19s college expenses/college fund (combo of 529, savings bonds and regular savings account) and my plan to ensure the 529 is fully burned down by the time she graduates without taking any excess distributions. One that tracks my progress towards my retirement, and to project how it be burned down once I'm there. One that calculates my expected income taxes at the end of the year, so I know I am not over/under withholding. And probably a few more.

Yes, I'm a spreadsheet nerd. I don't think I could live without Excel!

I honestly don't find it a big deal to manually enter everything. It takes just a few seconds to enter something - I usually just keep my receipts and enter them at the end of the day, and I get emails for most of my bills telling me how much I owe there so those are easy to enter too. Then at the end of each month I spend a half hour to an hour doing a final reconciliation to make sure I didn't miss anything. But if I was good and got it all entered correctly initially, it goes really fast.