blogger / nectarine / 2043 posts
@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.
grapefruit / 4045 posts
@Mrs. Carrot: I could have written your exact same post! Bigger house and a couple new expenses and yikes! I need a budget quick. I have started a manual one, and it really needs to be addressed weekly because our every week is different. I'm a bit exhausted by it already, but I'm really hoping that having one will help me worry less about our new tight budget.
cherry / 150 posts
@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.
pomegranate / 3113 posts
@Mrs. Carrot: I really like Personal Capital, the tools are way better than Mint. They do call every now and then, trying to get me to use their paid services, but I just ignore the calls. There’s another tracker I’ve heard mentioned on some podcasts I listen to called Clarity Money, but I don’t have any experience with it.
blogger / nectarine / 2043 posts
@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.
pomegranate / 3113 posts
@Mrs. Carrot: if you liked Learnvest, I bet you’ll like Personal Capital. Once you have your accounts synced, it’s easy to use and it’s pretty customizable. If you try it and have any questions about how to do certain things, let me know!
cherry / 150 posts
@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.
nectarine / 2400 posts
How’s everyone doing? Any bigs wins or problems? I’m just chugging along making payments on everything and hoping we get a tax return!
pear / 1565 posts
Doing good! Recently found out DH has leftover HSA money so what I've been saving as deductible for my upcoming birth, I can pretty much re-direct it elsewhere! But I'm gonna keep status quo for now and make sure the payment goes through after birth first.
nectarine / 2400 posts
I have most of my tax info - I think we might owe federal, hoping we get a state return to offset it
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