Budget Tools
Recently, I was asked how Galen and I keep track of our finances. Here is a little overview on some great tools to help you mange your money with more intention in 2015.
Mint
Galen and I use mint.com to stay on top of our finances. The best part of this website is its ability to link your accounts from checking and savings, to your mortgage and investments. Mint.com shows all your expenses in real time. I love that Galen and I both have access to this info on our phones and can check it no matter where we travel. Mint.com allows you to set up your monthly budget and it will keep track of your progress. I like that you can set up email reminders when bills are due, low balance alerts, and unusual spending. In the beginning many purchases show as uncategorized. Make sure you take a couple of minutes each week to update expenses to show the correct category. It doesn’t take long to switch the category and I have found mint.com is the easiest and quickest way to keep track of where our money is going. Another feature I like is the option to link our investment accounts and the ability to keep track of our saving goals. The main downfall is, that since the site is free to use, you will see a number of ads. I ignore all the ads and have turned off notifications so I don’t have to contend with ads in my email inbox. The key to success with mint.com is to keep your categories simple. For example instead of listing each vehicle you own just use transportation for all your auto expenses. We use the following categories: Giving, Saving, Home, Utilities, Transportation, Restaurants, Groceries, Clothing, Entertainment, Medical, Insurance, and Personal. You may have more or less, just find something that works for you and your family.
Dave Ramsey
NO secret, I love Dave Ramsey and his 7 baby steps to financial freedom. This is the plan that Galen and I have followed and has allowed us to become debt free except our home. We were introduced to his plan in 2004. We are currently trying to maintain step 4 and working on step 6. He has some great budget forms available on his website.
You can print or save these budget forms to your computer and enter your info manually. There is an option were you can pay $9.95 a month and use these budget tools online where the math is automatically done for you. When you pay the fee you will have access to the forums and the goal tracker portion of the site. If you aren’t familiar with Dave’s Plan I highly you read the “Total Money Makeover” and plan on attending Financial Peace University in your area. The 7 baby steps and the Financial Peace University class have been extremely helpful to get Galen and I on the same page about money and achieve our financial goals.
Pear Budget
If you don’t feel comfortable linking all your accounts to a website or if you don’t want to see all those ads checkout Pearbudet.com. Use their online version for $4.95 a month for an ad free experience. You can download their free Excel spreadsheet and do all your budgeting off line. I personally haven’t used this site. With the rise of security issues I want to offer a manual way to keep track of your budget.
Ready for Zero
I am a visual type of person. I love this site to see how much faster we can pay off our mortgage. I use the free option on readyforzero.com. This works for all sorts of debits like credit cards, and student loans. Just adjust how much you pay each month and this site figures out what day you will be debt free. Add an extra mortgage payment and this site does the math for you to show the new payoff date. Love it!
What Galen and I do:
I am the nerd in our relationship so I take care of balancing our accounts. I am not saying there is a right or wrong way this is just how I have found works for us. This is how I have our accounts setup.
Everyday checking account is our main account. Galen and I both use our debit cards from this account to pay for all of our expenses.
Money Market set up with the same bank. For any irregular expenses such as property taxes, and insurance which bill once or twice a year. I take last years bill and divide by 12. Each month I transfer that amount from our everyday checking to our money market. This allows us to have enough money when those bills come due and I can transfer money back to my checking account and pay the bill in full online. If I tried to keep these funds in my regular checking account I know I would spend them and we would be short when the bills come due.
Savings account set up with Capital One 360 for our emergency fund. We have 8 months of expenses saved that live in this account. Capital One 360 currently is earning .75%, more than our local bank offers. Having this money in a different institution allows us to make sure something is an emergency before transferring it to our everyday checking account.
Separate checking account setup for Galen’s work expenses and reimbursements. Galen gets reimbursed for some of his work expenses. In the beginning I tried to run all of his work expenses out of our everyday checking account and it got messy. I learned my lesson the hard way and now we don’t commingle any of his work expenses with our personal accounts.
In closing:
Just because you are living on a budget doesn’t mean you can’t have any fun. You need to budget some money for entertainment. Be intentional about not spending more than you earn. You don’t have to be perfect. Start where you are and try to be more intentional with your money in 2015. You will find it is a freeing feeling to be in control of your money. Galen and I have been working on the 7 baby steps since 2004. It won’t happen over night but with time you will be shocked at how far you have come with your finances. As Dave Ramsey says “Live like no one else today, so that in the future you can live like no one else”.
Tell me: How do you keep track of your finances? Post your comments on here my Facebook page.
Please note: I reserve the right to delete comments that are offensive or off-topic.