Hellobee Boards

@graceandjoy: We're in a similar place with money flying so my goal this year is to start tracking expenses again and see how much we're spending where. I did it religiously through a Mint-like platform that no longer exists, and then I got lazy last year because we were living pretty well below our means. And then we went from a light mortgage on our condo as our only debt to a larger mortgage on a house, a new car payment, plus all the new utilities and maintenance expenses that come with and there's definitely a need to get a better understanding on where everything is going so I'll be going back to a spreadsheet I designed. It's a little too manual for my liking so if anyone has a good financial tracker recommendation (not a budget and I'm not fond of Mint), I'd love ideas.

@Mrs. Carrot: is there a reason you don't want it to be a budgeting site/app? The most powerful analytics for spending I've found were in budgeting apps. I guess you could also use the drill down on credit cards with their categories they use.

My guess is that you probably could create a rough budget pretty easily with the expenses that are set numbers and have everything that you don't know where it's coming from be a flexible category. Then you just enter your expenses throughout the month. Assess at the end of the month, then reset and tweak for the next month.

@ilovepie: In fairness I haven't drilled down deep into the budgeting stuff out there, but I tried YNAB a couple years ago and found it really didn't fit my needs because it was much more focused on money in and out and moving things around and I just wanted something to help me categorize expenses and give me a clear picture of what we were spending. I used a tool Learnvest had previously and loved it because they downloaded all my transactions and I could set up whatever category I wanted to put those transactions into, but they shut it down a couple years ago. I don't love Mint because it's a little limited in categories, so I went to a spreadsheet but it forces me to download all our transactions manually and that's the part I'd love to automize ideally.

@Mrs. Carrot: oh ok. DH was very against linking our accounts to anything so everything I've tried is manual input. It's definitely more work.