Monthly budget outline

There are tons of free budget templates that come with Excel. Just look when you open a new spreadsheet...

I love the Every Dollar app by Dave Ramsey. We don’t follow his principals, but it makes you categorize every penny for the month so you can see where your “extra” is going.

I tried YNAB and just couldn't get into it. I found some reddit guys google sheets where you can customize everything and it's super simple. So I have a form saved to my phone where I can add each purchase in like 10 seconds

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I’m starting to realize that I actually don’t like budgeting. It’s much easier to just keep the credit card spending under a certain dollar amount and pay it off entirely every month

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I agree with you, and I don’t think most people are good at actually budgeting every month. However, I do think everyone should at least break down some sort of budget from time to time, how else can you come up with the magic number you want to try and stay under?

I’m recently switching to using a credit card only and staying under a certain amount. We were basically doing the same thing before, but using a checking that had what we budgeted for each pay period. That made it more difficult to see exactly how much we were really spending, and we were missing out on cash back from the CC.

At any rate, I’ve used and liked mint for budgeting forever, even though I don’t look at it very often. I also just noticed that the Chase app has a Spending and budgeting feature. I haven’t tried it yet, but the spending feature really put into perspective how much we were actually spending each month.

We have used YNAB for years. You give very dollar a home and track your spending vs budget using phone or computer. It was a game-changer for us after we started using YNAB.

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Hard to beat a simple spreadsheet

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I've tried all of the apps and websites. Nothing better to me than Google Sheets/Excel though. I have my formulas calculated, just enter the amounts each month.

I tried explaining to my wife that we really don't budget, we just track spending by categories. In my mind, budgeting requires regular effort to ensure you are not spending more than the allocated amount for each category. We started with the idea of doing this, but now just make sure we put the correct amount each month into the proper checking/savings accounts

We use Excel to track spending. Download every transactions from all credit cards and checking accounts. Then categorize them and drop them into a pivot table. Then figure out the monthly averages per category and adjust as needed.

Been using Mint for years now.

The idea of paying fees for a budgeting/spending app is so counter-intuitive to me. Plus, I don't want to give it access to my bank/savings accounts. Excel for me, esp. since I am more interested in tracking my current and historical expenses and assets, not so much planning a budget.