Budget assistance: recommendations?

Etaine

Hi there!

So, I've finally clawed my way to a much improved financial situation after many years of being hopeless with money. I'm free of "old" debts owed to a debt agency, and now only have currently active credit accounts that I manage meticulously (also easily). I'm trying to level up now and establish a budget that will help me reach a point (hopefully soon!) where I'm fully clearing my credit each month, and able to put away some savings too. Knowing my figures, this is now more than achievable with a little organisation. My eventual aim is to be in a position to purchase my first home, because I currently live in council housing with my children, and my daughter has very complex physical disabilities that will someday mean needing a bungalow with significant adaptations (virtually impossible via social housing where I live - we're fortunate to have been housed in a relatively suitable home as it is). I can also look forward to my credit reports all featuring nothing but nice green marks as of next year.

With that said, I need some sort of budgeting tool or app that helps me keep on top of things. I have several regular income sources, each with different regularities (monthly, bi-monthly, four-weekly), and my bills also each have different regularities (monthly and weekly). This makes budgeting quite tough as I can't work with a round, single monthly income figure. I've tried various apps recently, such as Emma, Cleo, Snoop etc, and none seem to fit quite right. I know what my maximum regular bills are monthly, and I have a food budget too, but my income drops during term-time as I'm a university student and Universal Credit deduct student loans from my entitlement.

Maybe something manual instead of AI would be better?

Any suggestions enormously welcome. Help me to continue learning and improving please - I've really come a long way and am so determined to keep going.

ZeroSum

MS money.. 

inspectorperez

If you are comfortable working with spreadsheets, there are some useful budgeting templates contained within Google docs or Microsoft Excel spreadsheets. My own preference would be Google docs (which is free) because it is relatively simple to use and quite flexible. You might also find it easier to work in calendar month segments even though your income sources are variable in this regard.

Once you became more familiar with how it works, you might wish to improve it by designing your own spreadsheet.

You will need some parent's "quiet time" without disturbances to do this properly otherwise it could become a chore however and be counter productive in terms of your objectives

colsten

MS Money or AceMoney. The former is no longer supported but lots of people use it and you can find free downloads (make sure it's a reputable source). AceMoney is supported but costs a one-off licence fee. Both are rock solid personal finance managers, not the gizzmo-types that you tried.

Etaine

Thanks all. I’m going to look into these today. I’m pretty terrible with Excel/formula-fuelled software, but willing to try and learn. I’m likely to be dependent on self-employment in the future so getting a grip on managing my own finances now is essential. 

getmore4less

MSMoney has just about everything you need from planning a budget recording the finances and creating reports and projections.

Once you get the hang of auto entry for all the regular stuff  the manual overhead is reduced a lot.

I think  "Money 2005 UK - QFE2"  is still the version needed for the UK a lot of the links to the MS downloads are dead.