Budgeting

[MrsSz]

I'm really trying to focus on our budget with DH no longer working (effective friday!) but I'm having a hard time finding a budgeting program or excell spreadsheet that I like. I've been using MINT, but it doesn't seem to be as helpful as I think a spreadsheet would be.. I just have no idea where to start in making one. Does anyone have one they use and like that they'd be willing to share? Or thoughts on where I could get one? Any help is, as always, greatly appreciated!


XOXO
Mrs. Sz

[SuzySunshine]

I use Quicken Essentials for Mac which is actually who owns Mint but I've never been able to get Mint to do what QE does. Before they made it QE it was just Quicken so I don't know if the current version is as good as it used to be but it helps me see all of my accounts, set more then 1 budget if I want, see scheduled and upcoming transactions, download directly from the internet and I'm sure there is much more that it does that I don't know about.

I'd like to find a software program that does all of that and will seamlessly sync to my iphone but that doesn't seem to exist yet or maybe I just haven't found it...

[diggitydot]

I make my own spreadsheet because I can't find anything that concisely does what I need without all the extra bells and whistles AND is user-friendly.

[niener]

I use Excel and Mint in conjunction with one another. Basically Mint tracks and (roughly) categorizes all my spending, and I pull that information into Excel and tweak it as necessary to line up with the monthly budgets I have set in Excel. You can set budgets in Mint but I like to mess around with different formulas in Excel because I'm nerdy like that.

[spotty_dog]

Bumping this...I used Mint for about a month, but it kept irritating me with all its glitches and I got this horrible feeling that if the next glitch involved compromising our information, it'd be ALL MY FAULT and DH would kill me.

So now I'm back to ground zero. Can't pull the credit card into Quicken because DH really just doesn't want to see it as anything but a payment in the checking account. (Oh, and yeesh I just read that my bank charges $3.95 per MONTH!) So those who use Excel, could you share a brief description of how you do it? I had a spreadsheet for budgeting in residency but it was SO crazy complicated, with separate tables for fixed and variable budget categories, then sub-tables to itemize purchases under each of those categories (feeding their sum to the main tables). I don't want to have to manually enter each and ever transaction into a separate budget category table again, but I'm drawing a blank on how to do it more simply.

[MissCrabette]

I don't use it now, but have you looked at Pear Budget's spreadsheet?

I can't say enough good things about the old (paid) version of Mvelopes.

[spotty_dog]

Sweet, thanks for the reference -- I hadn't heard of it!

[niener]

Huh that's odd, I haven't noticed many glitches with mint thankfully. I'm not sure how to get around entering by hand if you only use excel. I'm probably not much help because my setup is similar to what you described. My main worksheet is our entire budget, broken down into categories, subtotaled and then totaled (so for instance, food category is broken down into groceries, fast food and restaurants/bars, which is subtotaled and then all categories are totaled together at the bottom). There are two columns, one for Goal amount and one for Actual amount for each category. The goal amount is normally just copied over from month to month and the actual amounts are fed by a second worksheet that has all transactions organized by category. But that's where mint comes in for me -- I let it organize all the transactions into their appropriate category and then just export the data every so often and paste it into my second worksheet, rather than entering every transaction by hand.

[weeniegeniewife]

I like Mint but I am über-irritated with their spelling errors on their website and iPhone app. "Annuity" is NOT spelled "Annunity." I've sent numerous emails and they never fix it. Might seem petty, but spelling errors on professional sites/apps drive me bonkers.

[scrub-jay]

I like Mint but I am über-irritated with their spelling errors on their website and iPhone app. "Annuity" is NOT spelled "Annunity." I've sent numerous emails and they never fix it. Might seem petty, but spelling errors on professional sites/apps drive me bonkers.

Word. I've sent them emails on the SAME word in fact.

[weeniegeniewife]

I even posted a comment about it on their Facebook page and they just deleted my comment! How hard can it be to make a spelling change on an app update?

[spotty_dog]

I like Mint but I am über-irritated with their spelling errors on their website and iPhone app. "Annuity" is NOT spelled "Annunity." I've sent numerous emails and they never fix it. Might seem petty, but spelling errors on professional sites/apps drive me bonkers.

It's not petty, and it's the kind of thing that drove me away. Stupid small mistakes, repeated server errors and "uh-oh" pages are just not OK on a site that handles sensitive information. They need to handle the interface flawlessly or how am I to trust the back end? I emailed customer service about my difficulty logging in and error page after error page being thrown up, and 24 hours later (after the worst of it eased up but glitchy stuff kept happening), all they offered was, "I see your accounts have updated so you must be able to log in now, so there's nothing for us to do here!"

I'm pretty intrigued by Mvelopes, as it does aggregating/account download like Mint. But they won't tell you how much the service costs before you do a free trial.

I'm thinking of trying to get in the habit of downloading, maybe weekly, a series of .csv from the bank for all my accounts, but I need to figure out a streamlined way to handle the data or I'll never follow through on it. That's what I meant by getting around entering each transaction by hand -- blah.

[SoonerTexan]

While mints errors are annoying, I trust them as much as you can any corporation with my info because they are owned by Intuit...if you use turbotax, they are owned by the same people.

[MissCrabette]

I hate that they're not upfront about that. They've changed their pricing structure not too long ago when they started offering a free version. A quick chat with one of their reps (available 24/7) tells me it's $9.95/month, $95/year, or $329 for lifetime membership. I bought the lifetime membership a couple of years ago and haven't looked back.

If you're at all curious, use the trial. There's a bit of a steep learning curve. They're also notorious for charging your card the moment the trial expires and not bending the rules on refunding that money. Personally, I have no problem with that, but I know it angered a lot of people.

I'm still using the old version. I don't think the new one is quite polished enough for prime time yet.

[weeniegeniewife]

Cristina, do they have an iPhone app, or is just strictly desktop-based?