Online budgeting programs

[frugalone]

Hi, Folks--I haven't been on the boards in a long time. I hope everyone is doing OK!

I started reading a blog recently about money management. And some of the contributors mentioned online budgeting programs, such as Mvelopes, Mint.com and You Need a Budget. I'm trying out all three of them, and I have to say, I'm not thrilled with any of them. They either 1) aren't functioning properly (i.e. not importing my financial info); 2) Have no way to set up starting balances on accounts (they will only "read" what you've currently got in your bank account); and 3) Are just utterly confusing to use.

Basically, here's what I've been doing for a while now. Following Mary Hunt's advice (at least I think it was her), I set up a Freedom Account to cover things such as birthdays, holidays, car insurance, etc. that recur occasionally. Every paycheck (2x a month), $70 goes into that account, and I fund the different categories. I've been doing this with a manual spreadsheet I found for free on the Internet. Every week, $20 goes into my travel fund, but I do not manually track that. All of these programs require me to manually do a split for the Freedom Account, which is a bit time consuming and tedious. I've found limited support (or in some cases, what I suspect is 'bot support.)

What I'd like to do is get a better handle on where my paycheck is going. I don't use cash much, so I'm trying to track the debit card. I want to be able to see how much I've spent on, say, gas for the car in the last few months. I'm not a daily-latte-and-newspaper kind of gal, so I don't really need a little notebook where I write down every expense.

Can anyone recommend a better (and free or cheap) program for what I'm attempting to do?

What's your experience with any or all of these programs/sites?

Thanks!

[Mary B.]

Hey, welcome back!

I've found the easiest way to check for spending on a particular thing is to use the account inquiry function in my credit union's online banking system. It helps that we buy all our gas at the same place (small town! one gas station!). I can search "withdrawals only" and include "description" -- the name of the business -- and transactions all pop up on a single screen.

My credit union also lets me download the results as a pdf, as a spreadsheet, or to various other programs, but I don't usually bother doing that.

Maybe that will help?

[bicyclist]

Dear Frugalone, I like "Simple Plan" which is transmitted digitally when one buys it. Your spending categories are listed in the program and you can add categories that may be missing or more useful. It keeps track of expenses several ways and there are versions to track mortgage payments and other issues. Bicyclist

[frugalone]

Thank you, Mary B.

My credit union will let me download results, but there does not seem a way to do an account inquiry to categorize spending. I did download results as a spreadsheet once, in CSV mode, and it was a major pain in the rear to sort things out. Oh well...

Hey, welcome back!

I've found the easiest way to check for spending on a particular thing is to use the account inquiry function in my credit union's online banking system. It helps that we buy all our gas at the same place (small town! one gas station!). I can search "withdrawals only" and include "description" -- the name of the business -- and transactions all pop up on a single screen.

My credit union also lets me download the results as a pdf, as a spreadsheet, or to various other programs, but I don't usually bother doing that.

Maybe that will help?

[frugalone]

Hi! Do you mean: https://www.budgetsimple.com

I can't find anything called Simple Plan.

Dear Frugalone, I like "Simple Plan" which is transmitted digitally when one buys it. Your spending categories are listed in the program and you can add categories that may be missing or more useful. It keeps track of expenses several ways and there are versions to track mortgage payments and other issues. Bicyclist

[catherine]

Given what you're looking for, I'm surprised that you don't like mint.com. I think Mint does a great job of reporting spending over time, and it's very intuitive. I very frequently sort the data to see how much I'm spending in particular categories.

I also use YNAB, and I do agree that that's a little more confusing to use. But I really like it for tracking spending.

Another one (not cheap, though) is Dave Ramsey's EveryDollar. It's a zero-based budget tool, but you do have to manually drag and drop the imported transactions from your account.

If you only use one card, some of them actually report spending in categories, like AMEX.

But, really, it may be worth working with Mint.com.

[frugalone]

There are some things I like about Mint. However, their support seems a bit minimal. I will stick with it, though, as I think I like it the best out of the three plans I've tried.

[lhamo]

I don't really use their budgeting feature but another one you might try is yodlee's moneycenter -- I've been using it as my online money management tool since at least 2003.

[ToomuchStuff]

I don't use any of the online ones. Part of the issue for me is privacy, part is availability. I use a lot of open source software, and the two programs that I would recommend for you is Gnucash (full accounting software) and Libreoffice (office suite).

[TVRodriguez]

I've been using Mint for a couple of years now. I find that its usefulness grows over time as it gets more data. It's not perfect but it's useful to me. I don't have separate sub-accounts like you described (for travel, holidays, etc.). I used to have separate accounts in an online savings bank, and I used the nickname feature to keep track of all of them. I scrapped that, though, and now have just the one emergency reserve.