Budgeting tools recommendations?

Shoxt3r

Hi all,
We've been putting together our accounts in a spreadsheet for years now but it's always looking backwards at what we've spent rather than getting a firm grasp on budgeting and factoring in future costs - i.e. predicting that if we continue at the current rate or have to factor anything in the future into the equation we'll be in trouble, or if we'll actually have spare cash. - more visibility of the general cashflow situation I suppose!

So, I'm looking into recommendations of something we can use easily to plug in our expenses and any future predicted costs (e.g. insurance, car servicing).

I've found a few free tools online but no idea how good they are really - some seem to say they can connect to our bank accounts to import the data which I'm very wary of and some even COST money per month which I'm really not up for!

Here are some free examples I've come across:

https://my.pocketsmith.com/plans

https://www.honeydue.com/

https://pocketguard.com/

https://mint.intuit.com/
Any thoughts please?

getmore4less

YNAB has become the popular debt buster tool.

The best one if are happy with PC only and no app type support  so mainly manual setup 

they stopped work on it because it did everything.
MSMoney, 
Available free  : Money2005-UK-QFE2.exe  was the final UK release 
(quicken was also good)

Manual entry is not that big a problem as most things can be automated as regular and just need minor adjustments.
eg  You can set up your council tax as a repeat and only need to redo it once a year when the new bill comes in.

it has fantastic report generating and graphs for looking ta cashflows etc.
if you want stock market  someone has done a addon to keep that working.

I like it because it models real life very well so you can have an accounts view of your money but also change to caegories to track what you have been spending even if across multiple accounts and cash.

the forecasting is good 

AbundantBudget

getmore4less said:

YNAB has become the popular debt buster tool.

The best one if are happy with PC only and no app type support  so mainly manual setup 

YNAB has app, you can even open both (PC and app) at the same time if you wish and they will syncronise. I prefer to do some postings in app and some on PC. But OP stated they don't want to pay for the budgeting tool and YNAB is only free for 32 or 34 days or for a year if you are a student. I still think it's the best tool and happy to pay for it, it helped me a lot.

Shoxt3r

getmore4less said:

YNAB has become the popular debt buster tool.

The best one if are happy with PC only and no app type support  so mainly manual setup 

they stopped work on it because it did everything.
MSMoney, 
Available free  : Money2005-UK-QFE2.exe  was the final UK release 
(quicken was also good)

Manual entry is not that big a problem as most things can be automated as regular and just need minor adjustments.
eg  You can set up your council tax as a repeat and only need to redo it once a year when the new bill comes in.

it has fantastic report generating and graphs for looking ta cashflows etc.
if you want stock market  someone has done a addon to keep that working.

I like it because it models real life very well so you can have an accounts view of your money but also change to caegories to track what you have been spending even if across multiple accounts and cash.

the forecasting is good 

Thanks! I've managed to find a download link for Microsoft Money 2005 on a blog so will give that a go
https://www.garethjmsaunders.co.uk/2011/11/27/download-microsoft-money-2005-for-free/
As for YNAB, it looks good but I just can't justify paying out for an app when I'm trying to save money personally - thanks for the recommendation though, I might look into it further if I exhaust the other, free options

getmore4less

AbundantBudget said:

getmore4less said:

YNAB has become the popular debt buster tool.

The best one if are happy with PC only and no app type support  so mainly manual setup 

YNAB has app, you can even open both (PC and app) at the same time if you wish and they will syncronise. I prefer to do some postings in app and some on PC. But OP stated they don't want to pay for the budgeting tool and YNAB is only free for 32 or 34 days or for a year if you are a student. I still think it's the best tool and happy to pay for it, it helped me a lot.

I did look at YNAB when it was free but it was flawed in a lot of ways, I know they have fixed a lot of stuff but they need people paying to keep the development going to catch up with where the old tools like MSmoney and Quicken had got to.

It may have improved but was very focused on cashflow which is the second part of proper budgeting after making the plan

Helped a lot of people that did not have a clue with some fairly good tutorials on the basics.

Shoxt3r

getmore4less said:

AbundantBudget said:

getmore4less said:

YNAB has become the popular debt buster tool.

The best one if are happy with PC only and no app type support  so mainly manual setup 

YNAB has app, you can even open both (PC and app) at the same time if you wish and they will syncronise. I prefer to do some postings in app and some on PC. But OP stated they don't want to pay for the budgeting tool and YNAB is only free for 32 or 34 days or for a year if you are a student. I still think it's the best tool and happy to pay for it, it helped me a lot.

I did look at YNAB when it was free but it was flawed in a lot of ways, I know they have fixed a lot of stuff but they need people paying to keep the development going to catch up with where the old tools like MSmoney and Quicken had got to.

It may have improved but was very focused on cashflow which is the second part of proper budgeting after making the plan

Helped a lot of people that did not have a clue with some fairly good tutorials on the basics.

Thanks! It does make sense why they charge to be honest - after all how can any of these tools improve without investment (speaking from a developer point of view as well!).

I've just been setting up Microsoft Money 2005 with all of our regular expenses and income but I'm a little unclear how best to set up fluctuating credit card bills which are usually paid off in full on a monthly basis. I can foresee that the forecast view is going to look unrealistic since we'll never be able to factor in upcoming credit card payments as they are always a month behind.

For example, at the moment with the way things are in MS Money, it looks like we're going to be fantastically well-off in just a few months because I haven't put in the monthly credit card bills 

colsten

You can simply set up an account in which you record your CC purchases, in the same way as you would record your debit card purchases. When you pay your CC, you transfer money from your current account to your CC account.

If that‘t too much hassle, you just add your CC payment as a transaction to your current account once you get your CC statement. You can also add transactions with your estimated CC bills to your current account, and update the amounts as you get the actual monthly statements 

Shoxt3r

Thank you!
If I opted for the first option where we create a separate account for the CC, is there a way to do something like "take X from Current Account based on CC balance from Point A to Point B on this date"? That way it could run itself for the payment part, based on what we enter into the CC account data manually.

If not, then we'd probably just opt to create estimates as you say, then set up CC payments as separate transactions against the Current Account (rather than having a separate CC account) when the statement comes through, as that would give us a picture of what we're spending on each category.

colsten

AFAIK, there is no "if this, then that" functionality in MS Money. What I do (in my MS Money clone) is, as soon as I get my CC statement, add a Transfer from current account to CC account. At this stage, I also reconcile the transactions on the CC statement with the transactions I recorded manually in the CC account. You could, of course, reconcile more frequently against the transactions in your credit card app.

When the payment for the CC got taken (by DD), I mark the transaction in the current account & CC account as completed, and I add a payment to the CC company to the CC account. 

I like to keep things separate in the CC account (of which I have several, one per card) as this makes reconciling things easier.

This might all sound much more complicated than it is, as typing this took me longer than actually doing it   

getmore4less

The key with MSmoney is getting the categories and budget right first, 

Also helps to think about payee eg for food categoty there  could be multiple payees, Tesco, Morrisons Waitrose....

The CC is just an account that goes up and down as you spend and pay it off.

What is important is where that money goes, the category of spend.

I have an account for cash£, cash€ cash$ and categorise cash spend from that account.
I have accounts for each utility to track the credit/debit on those


Play with split transactions for things like using the CC at the supermarket where there are multiple transaction.

you forecast on your budget 

getmore4less

Shoxt3r said:

Thank you!
If I opted for the first option where we create a separate account for the CC, is there a way to do something like "take X from Current Account based on CC balance from Point A to Point B on this date"? That way it could run itself for the payment part, based on what we enter into the CC account data manually.

If not, then we'd probably just opt to create estimates as you say, then set up CC payments as separate transactions against the Current Account (rather than having a separate CC account) when the statement comes through, as that would give us a picture of what we're spending on each category.

In the bills section I set up a recurring transaction on the date the CC DD goes out with a guess amount 
you need to use transaction type Transfer to: "CC account" from "bank account"

Then when the  CC statement comes you can update the amount and then check the date as WE/BH can move the actual date. 
I found most months the same stuff ends up so the amount tends to be similar, when we are back doing holidays that changes for the bigger items.