Josh Young

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.

PearBudget.com

Wesabe.com

Josh Young Finance, Google, Organization, Productivity, Reviews, Tech, Web