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Hate Budgeting? 10 Tools to Simplify Your Monthly Budget

By David Weliver

It’s impossible to live within your means, eliminate debt, and accumulate wealth if you don’t know where your money goes. That’s why a monthly budget is a crucial part of any financial plan. Budgeting the old fashioned way––with a stack of receipts and a calculator, was a time-consuming bore. But today, several powerful budgeting tools obliterate any excuse for spending without a budget. Some cost just a few dollars a month, others are 100% free. Check them out:

1. Mint –- Rapidly becoming the most popular budgeting tool, period, Mint.com is an elegantly simple and FREE budgeting platform with commanding tools. Mint provides secure account aggregation, the ability to create a budget in a few clicks, and email alerts when you exceed a budget area for the month. For more, read my Mint.com review.

2. Mvelopes –- For about between $7 and $13 a month (after a free one month trial), Mvelopes offers a unique, simple, online budgeting solution that allocates your income into “envelopes” for various expenses, then deducts funds from the appropriate envelope as you spend. Also see the full review of Mvelopes I wrote a while ago.

3. Shoeboxed –- Dubbed the “Netflix” of Receipt Organization, Shoeboxed offers a suite of simple budgeting tools plus their unique mail-in receipt scanning service. For $9.95 a month, send them your receipts in a prepaid envelope and view and organize them online in a few days. Read my recent Shoeboxed review.

4. Microsoft Money –- Have multiple sources of income and investments? Full featured personal finance software like Microsoft Money maybe your answer. For $50 Money gives you access to advanced reports many online budgeting solutions don’t yet offer.

5. Simple Planning Budget Worksheet –- SimplePlanning.net offers an Excel-based budget planner for a one-time fee of $9.95. If you’re looking for more than what free worksheets can offer, but don’t want to pay a monthly fee, this might be the tool for you.

6. Geezeo –- Geezeo combines social networking with powerful, free budgeting tools. Geezeo securely aggregates all your online accounts (checking, savings, credit cards, etc) into one place, and even lets you check your finances from your mobile phone!

7. Quicken –- If you want a powerful total personal finance software solution, look no farther than Quicken. At $59.99, Quicken Deluxe is pricier than some solutions, but provides the most power, too. To learn more, read my Quicken Deluxe review.

8. My Free Spreadsheet -– Don’t feel like logging on to get your budget? A ways back I wrote this simple monthly budget spreadsheet for Microsoft Excel that will allow you to tally up your expenses and see what percentage of your income you spend on debt, transportation, housing, saving, and other costs.

9. Other Free Templates –- Not impressed with my little spreadsheet? No offense taken. You can find additional free budget templates for Excel and Word directly from Microsoft.

10. BillQ –- Don’t feel like tracking all of your expenses, just the ones you need to pay on time? BillQ is for you. The free service sets reminders of all your bills and compiles monthly reports for what you paid and when. It’s also a great way to split the rent and utilities with roommates.

Do you use any of these to write your monthly budget? Or something else? How has it worked for you?

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Published on March 12th, 2008.

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6 Response(s)

  1. kentuckyliz

    You should also link to YNAB (You Need A Budget)–a strength of this program is that it tracks accumulating sinking funds. –That’s where my system breaks down, but I’m fiddling around with a solution now. If it doesn’t work, I’m getting YNAB.

    http://www.youneedabudget.com/index.php

    21 March 2008 at 10:57 am permalink Reply
  2. Rob

    Let it just be stated that I am concerned about privacy and do not like having my financial information stored on more servers than necessary. Partially because of these concerns, I’ve elected to use money management systems stored locally on my own computers.

    For those who use Linux, a very popular program is GnuCash. GnuCash allows users to download transaction records directly from their credit and banking institutions (that is, if their online banking and account management supports the common protocol: e.g. Citi lets me download my credit card transactions, whereas my regional bank does not for “security reasons.”) I find that this tool allows me to organize and analyze my expenses intuitively for the nice price of $0.00. GnuCash also works for people outside of the US as well, something I’m not sure of for Microsoft Money or Quicken.

    21 March 2008 at 8:11 pm permalink Reply
  3. George

    If you enjoy using Excel, you may want to consider a customized Excel file that includes registers (similar to a checkbook to track your accounts), the ability to create your own categories, create a monthly budget and view reports such as budget vs actual in a simple dashboard layout. See:

    http://www.georgesbudget.com/

    21 September 2009 at 4:41 pm permalink Reply
  4. Nate

    http://sites.google.com/site/simpledbudget/

    I know that there are a lot of impressive and robust budgeting solutions around, but since my needs are simple … I like things that ARE simple, and free.

    I ran across a nifty little program called SimpleD Budget about a year ago when my finances were a mess and I desperately needed something I could use to figure out my spending.

    The simplicity is it’s power, in that you can bend it’s functionality to your own needs. The only serious issue is that the print function doesn’t work.

    It’s free, it’s easy and you can plan for months ahead if you wish. I’ve tried Quicken online and though I find it impressive, I still want more freedom than it allows. SimpleD lets you do whatever you want, and that’s what I want.

    12 November 2009 at 10:05 am permalink Reply
  5. Shankor Bhawal

    At first I started to track my expenses when I admitted in college and I was able save some bucks. If you can’t track it manually then it will be worth to use a tool.

    But it will not be a good decision if you spend/waste money to save money. There are lots of free online or offline stuffs for budgeting. Just figure out which is perfect for you.

    And finally thanks to David Weliver to share this list. Personally I like Geezeo for its simple interface.

    13 August 2010 at 2:49 pm permalink Reply

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