February 22, 2007
PearBudget and Wesabe.com
Right now I have a handful of things that I’ve been meaning to post about for a while but just haven’t. This is one of them.
We’ve been sort of redoing our budget and diligently tracking our spending lately since we’re new homeowners and whatnot (trying to stay on top of the game), and being the geek that I am, I looked all over for a good tech solution to help us with that.
Last year at some point, I stumbled upon (after a LOT of looking at other solutions) the website PearBudget.com. Not much to the site except the download link to one of the most awesome pieces of Excel handiwork I’ve ever seen. PearBudget was built to be easy and informative. You can assign categories to three different expense types (regular, irregular, and variable). Everything is very well explained within the cells of the spreadsheet, and there are notes and comments everywhere. You set your budget, enter your amounts, and it tells you in plain English how much you spent, how much you made, how you did with your budget each month (and a summary for the year), so you can easily track and adjust things as you go. I can’t say enough about how awesome PearBudget really is.
Except for one thing. It’s not online.
I’m on several different computers all day, so I like to be able to access important things online whenever I want instead of having to be on a specific machine. Thankfully, PearBudget has a Web2.0 version in the works, but it’s been a LONG time in the making, and although it was recently “finished”, the creator decided to go back to the drawing board to make it even more dummy-proof (AHHH!).
So since I was a little frustrated with this, I set out to find some more options. First, I thought, I’ll just throw PearBudget into Google Spreadsheets. Easy enough, right? Wrong. There are so many notes, comments, and conditional formatting, that it just loses it’s kitsch (and some of its functionality too). Plus, it’s a hefty spreadsheet (as in size), so it’s not exactly optimized for Google Spreadsheets.
Then, I ran into another little gem called Wesabe.com.
We’ve sort of changed our spending methods so that we use very little cash. Most everything is either with a debit card or a credit card (which we pay off each month in full). That way all of our transactions are already tracked for us. With PearBudget, we have to type in each transaction — not a big deal, but still slightly time consuming (maybe 15 minutes, once a week). With Wesabe, you can create a free account, download your transaction data from your bank in any one of a few different formats (thus it doesn’t contain any account info — only transactional data, so there’s no security risk), and then upload it to your account on Wesabe.com.
With the free account, you can upload up to three accounts (which is handy, because that’s exactly how many we track). Once your data is uploaded, you can tag and edit each transaction. I use my tags as sort of spending categories. Then, you can set a monthly spending limit on each tag (category) — there’s your budget.
The cool thing about Wesabe.com is that if you, for example, you eat at a certain restaurant all the time, once you edit the name and the tags in Wesabe, it remembers it the next time, so you don’t have to re-tag or re-name the new entry. It works great. Another cool thing is that it looks at your tags and gives you tips from the Wesabe community on how to save money in that certain area. There are some very helpful tips on there.
You can also set goals and track your progress. For example, if you have a goal of saving $500 for something, you can set a goal for that and use tags to track your progress. You can even get tips from others about it if you wish.
Overall, these are two great tools to help you track your personal finances. There are benefits to both. I’m really anxious to see PearBudget’s Web2.0 project though. I think that could really be a winner — if they ever finish it.
Obviously, there are a lot of other solutions out there, but as far as free options that fit our needs, these were the two strongest. Mvelopes.com seems to be really great too, but it’s a subscription service (and I feel a little weird about paying money to manage and track my money). If you want some more great ideas up this alley, check out some things they’ve had on Lifehacker.com in the Personal Finance Category.
February 22nd, 2007 at 6:34 pm
Hey, Josh,
I’m glad to hear you like Wesabe! Please be sure to let us know if there’s any way we can make it more useful for you.
I also like PearBudget and think Charlie (the developer) is a great guy, so it’s definitely worth checking out, too. Hopefully we can make the two tools work together over time.
Thanks again.
Marc Hedlund
Wesabe
February 23rd, 2007 at 7:21 am
Josh -
Wow. Thanks for the great comments. I know … online access would be great, right? We’re working on it. But your comments about the spreadsheet version are really encouraging. Thanks for that.
So glad you found Wesabe. They’ve got a great product and a great *community*, which is awesome. And they’re great folks, so it’s just … great!
I’m also hoping (as you said, “if we ever finish it!”) that we’ll be able to interface with Wesabe. (Marc, I think I owe you an e-mail.)
Anyway, Josh, best of luck with your budgeting and your ministry. And, once more: thanks.
February 23rd, 2007 at 9:13 am
Marc and Charlie,
Thanks for the comments and for showing that you care about your users! Great to hear that you two are interested in working together. I think that would be awesome. You both have such great ideas in this area, it would be amazing to see something that is a collaboration between the two of you. I really do appreciate all of the hard work you’ve both put into your products. They are making a difference for a LOT of people. Keep up the good work! And I’ll let you know if I have any suggestions on either of them.
You guys rock.
March 2nd, 2007 at 5:29 pm
Hey Josh, have you ever taken a look at what actually gets downloaded in those “transaction” files? If you take a close look, they actually contain your bank account numbers. Log in to your bank’s website and manually download a .ofx file and open it with Wordpad. You’ll see your account number is plain text.
March 26th, 2007 at 10:06 am
Hi Josh - AWESOME post!
I absolutely love finding and reviewing new personal finance tools, and I’ve already bookmarked these two. I’ve been using Mvelopes on a free 1-year service account I won. It’s very cool and helped us a lot but, like you, I can’t justify paying a high monthly fee to manage my money. That reminds me… I have to cancel by the end of this month or it will auto renew! :-)
Anyway, I’m really curious to know if you’ve ever evaluated YNAB (You Need a Budget). If so, what did you think about it and how did it compare to the tools you mentioned here? I really like the envelope style of budgeting, and I’m just not sure yet if I can do that with PearBudget or Wesabe.
Thanks!
March 26th, 2007 at 10:29 am
Dave: I started to write a reply to your comment, and it got sort of long, so I decided to just make a post about it. I’ll put a link to it in this comment once I post it.
Thanks for your comment!
March 26th, 2007 at 2:19 pm
[...] is mostly in response to a comment by Dave M on my post entitled PearBudget and Wesabe.com: Hi Josh - AWESOME [...]
June 19th, 2007 at 10:41 am
[...] of personal finance sites, and one of those sites was Wesabe.com. I’ve written about Wesabe a couple of times on here, so she wanted to see how it had helped [...]