Best way to budget

Debtfreemooo

What is the best way to budget / pay bills etc with a joint account ? Ideally I’d like one account for all bills, one for petrol, one for food, one for everyday spends and one for savings but find it difficult to do this when there is two of us and some outgoings aren’t the same every month.
What does everyone else do?
Thanks

[Deleted User]

Are you saying you want 5 accounts?

That’s a bit OTT

Jami74

Debtfreemooo wrote: »

What is the best way to budget / pay bills etc with a joint account ? Ideally I’d like one account for all bills, one for petrol, one for food, one for everyday spends and one for savings but find it difficult to do this when there is two of us and some outgoings aren’t the same every month.
What does everyone else do?
Thanks

How about a joint account which you both pay a fixed amount in each month to cover shared bills and shared spending. If you have one that pays interest then you can also use it to accumulate some savings for payment of bigger items (new fridge/holiday).
Personal accounts each to pay for your own transport and personal spends. And personal savings accounts.
A credit card to pay for food that is settled in full from the joint account (this gives you the advantage of knowing how much you both need to deposit that month).

Debtfreemooo

Thanks Jami74

bd10

Hi, my budgeting tool is excel. Annual overview with monthly breakdowns of all incomings and essential outgoings (mortgage, savings, utility bills, insurance, ..., things I cannot miss). Next I know based on past expenditure how much to budget for food. The balance is for going out/discretionary spending. My regular food budget I load onto my Starling account and so I can easily track how much I spend where and also whether I am going overboard say at Waitrose or M&S etc. To keep track on what precisely I spend it, I attach receipts onto the transaction in Starling, so I can easily find out why I spend more than usual at the shop.
Instead of using a secondary Starling account you could achieve the same using a rewards credit cards. It's a matter of taste really. But if you budget, debit cards have one big psychological advantage: studies showed that when money is actually leaving the account consumers are more acutely aware of their spending and spend less as there is a direct link between acquiring something and paying for it, or conversely, when paying with credit cards, one tends to spend a little more.

bd10

Here's an example of spending categories at Starling: https://www.starlingbank.com/blog/spending-insights-feature/

jonnygee2

Have you ever tried Monzo?

It does have a very good spending tab which is how I do my budgeting now. It allows you to set a monthly budget and then tracks whether you are on track for the month. It also automatically separates regular bills out from spending, tracks what categories your spending is automatically, and let's you move money in and out of 'pots' (small separate balances).

Overall its pretty flexible and can probably help with what you want.

getmore4less

Debtfreemooo wrote: »

What is the best way to budget / pay bills etc with a joint account ? Ideally I’d like one account for all bills, one for petrol, one for food, one for everyday spends and one for savings but find it difficult to do this when there is two of us and some outgoings aren’t the same every month.
What does everyone else do?
Thanks

A budget is the plan of how you want to allocate your income(s), best done over at least a year, this can be individual or joint or 3, 2 individual and a joint.

Once you have the plan, where you keep you money does not matter as you track to the plan using tools that work best for you.

That might be different accounts, virtual accounting or just category tracking.

The best featured tool by far for planning budgets and modelling personal accounting is still MSmoney.


A good starting point is the SOA format, do it for a full year of income and outgoings/savings

http://www.stoozing.com/calculator/soa.php

once you have a balanced SOA for a year you can look at the cashflow over the year to see when you can spend the money.

db2016

i dunno about debit cards, but i only use them for online things (same as i do credit cards).



most daily real life spending comes out of a wallet, that is best imo, gives that sense of the "balance" going down, i input all spends / incomes into mobilis, a tracking app. also taking out of wallet gives that few moments of "do i need this" etc. as its another step in the purchase, not just a tap or an input of pin etc.

out of all my friends etc im the odd one out doing this, being male and 32, most of them tap n go etc. lol

getmore4less

If you budget you know what you have to spend on everything.

You don't need a sence that the money is going down.

If it is not on the budget you don't buy it, without knowing you can adjust the budget to include it

Jami74

db2016 wrote: »

most daily real life spending comes out of a wallet, that is best imo, gives that sense of the "balance" going down, i input all spends / incomes into mobilis, a tracking app. also taking out of wallet gives that few moments of "do i need this" etc. as its another step in the purchase, not just a tap or an input of pin etc.

I stopped using cash a couple of years ago when I started to take proper care of my money. I found that once I'd split a tenner I struggled to account for the change and at the time I didn't have a phone that coped very well with apps. I'd always end up wondering what I had spent that missing £1.13 on, or if I'd just put it somewhere else.

Just about everything now goes via card/bank. I then update my spreadsheet from my banking apps so can account for every penny. I also no longer have a copper jar :rotfl:

I'm female and older. Just in case it matters.