Free monthly budget software?

[tzikeh]

I am trying to keep a much closer eye on where every penny goes during the month. I just need something where I can input how much comes in, what I spend it on, and any "surprise" income or expenses, that will tell me how much money I have left til X date, and how much that comes out to per day until X date. The only requirement other than that it run on OSX is that it's free.

I'm currently wandering through the instructions for:

Budget Tracker.

Buddi.

The PearBudget spreadsheet template that works with Excel and OpenOffice.

Mint.

Are any of you using any of these? What do you like about it? Do you use something that isn't on this list that you like?

Thanks for any info!

Comments

[svilleficrecs.livejournal.com]

Mint is cool, I use it to track various accounts, but it only recently(ish) added a forward looking feature (like, put 70 bill here for next week). But, I've had issues using that, since the hypthetical future stuff can get confused with the actual.

The one I do use (on a more than daily basis) is http://www.mechcad.net/products/acemoney/index_lite.shtml AceMoney Lite. It's the freeware version. They have a full version, but I've done perfectly fine for a year+ using it. It's not fancy looking, and IDK exactly how many accounts you can track w/ the lite version, but since I really only track my checking account (nothing else has that sort of traffic) it's perfect for me.

Mint is great, however, for gathering all your info in one place and having graphs of the current state of your accounts, but for making sure you remember that you've got that cable bill coming out next week, so spending $10 now will make your rent (coming out two days after that) bounce, Ace money is my rec,.

[tzikeh.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I only have a checking account, so Ace sounds like a good plan. I'll check that one out too! Thanks for the suggestion.

Except -

[tzikeh.livejournal.com]

you missed the part in the post where the application has to run on OS X. So no Ace for me.

Re: Except -

[svilleficrecs.livejournal.com]

ACK. Sorry :(

[vickita.livejournal.com]

I've been using Mint all year -- it was part of my "get organized" push around the new year -- and I've been very happy with it. Occasionally there'll be a hiccup in the communications between it and one of my banks or whatever, but for the most part it's been painless.

The thing I like best about it is how little effort it requires from me. I'm *constantly* looking for ways to scrape together a few more minutes here and there for myself, and this has helped a lot.

I still maintain a Quicken file (oooold version of Quicken, because Intuit has pretty much spazzed on the Mac platform for *years*) to keep track of how much actual $$$ I have in my actual checking account, because I can enter future, scheduled transactions there (I've gone auto-pay on every bill I possibly can), and figure out how much $$$ I'm going to have left at the end of my month, or vice-versa. *g*

[tzikeh.livejournal.com]

I'm concerned about Mint - once I looked at it and realized it was an online application, I backed away. I want something that's on my desktop that's just for me and doesn't connect to anything.

[vickita.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I grok that. It wouldn't have been my first choice, but I needed something that would work without me spending a lot of intensive time entering information, because that just. wasn't. happening. The latest version of Quicken (at least at that time) for the Mac flat out didn't work, and I made them give me my $$$ back. Decided that I'm already online-everything-ing anyway, and just went with it. It works reeeeeeally well, man. It's sweet. But I definitely understand your discomfort.

[svilleficrecs.livejournal.com]

FWIW, Mint is part of the same company that owns Quicken, so if you trust Quicken, you could consider trusting Mint. And I've used them about 2 yrs with no problems. The one good part w/ them, is that they auto-download your info from the various places for you, so if you want to track your checking, credit card, etc, and not go through the hassle of logging in and out of different sites for the info, it's quite nice.

I *totally* understand the trepidation with it being an online app, but like I said, Quicken pedigree and a decent amount of plusses.

[boniblithe.livejournal.com]

Do you online bank? I pay my bills through online banking and use my debit card for most purchases. I can run monthly reports from the bank's own website, where they store all my data, which eventually someday they will use to give my identity to the clone army they will enslave to take over the earth.

[tzikeh.livejournal.com]

Yes, I bank online and pay bills that way, but that really has nothing to do with what I want. I want a spreadsheet or something like it so that I can start with my monthly budget, and list what all of my expenses are, look at how much discretionary money I have for any given month, track bi-monthly expenses, etc.

[boniblithe.livejournal.com]

Ah! For that I dump my banking into Excel and have my own spreadsheet I built to show me paycheck - spending = leftover. But your software links are interesting and sound easier, I will check them out!

[terrio]

I don't use a financial app myself, but I did a search for "finance" on MacUpdate, and these were the freeware apps that looked promising:

MoneyGuru -- actually, "fairware" rather than freeware; I don't know if the software nags or not, but it seems like you could probably use it without paying. It seems to be the most powerful of the ones I found, and from people's comments, looks like it probably does everything you need.

Stash -- this one is actually freeware and seems fairly powerful.

Mini$ -- couldn't tell how powerful this one was, but people seem to like it, for whatever that's worth. :-)

[fantasmabob.livejournal.com]

I use Mint. It's okay, except for the way it keeps trying to categorize my monthly subway pass as fast food. Mostly I use the Net Income chart they provide.

You can set it up to email you if you go over budget in a particular category each month. I don't particularly care for the categories they provide, but YMMV.

[taffimai.livejournal.com]

I've had good luck re-categorizing and picking the option to make the recategorization a rule so that it will do it correctly in the future.

[fantasmabob.livejournal.com]

I'll give that a try, thanks!

[stevenglassman.livejournal.com]

I was about to say the same thing, basically. Mint can be trained, if you know which little ticky box to click.

[the-shoshanna.livejournal.com]

It took me forever to find a money-tracking program I like, because I don't want a budget that tracks what I have spent in the past, and I dislike and don't understand spreadsheets, and moreover most of the ones I looked at broke things down into too-large chunks of time, like a month or a week -- if your spreadsheet calculates month by month, say, and you have a $100 bill due on the 5th and expect to receive $200 on the 15th, your spreadsheet will only show a net increase of $100 for the month, totally failing to warn you that you may be underwater for ten days.

So these days I live by a donationware Java app called Budget4All, which is not a budgeting program but a cash flow (or cash balance) forecaster. (So if you specifically want a *budgeting* program, or one that can track investments etc., this is not for you. I specifically want a balance forecaster. Budget4All is not concerned with what you have spent in the past; it projects your expected income and expenses in the future.) It runs on my Mac, although it's not pretty, being Java and designed for Windows; and it lets me tell it, "Okay, I have this much cash on hand right now, and I have the following expected regular income items and the following expected irregular ones, and the same for expenses: now show me my cash flow and expected balance for the next week/month/year." And it calculates day by day, so none of that "You'll be up by $100 this month!" without noting that you'll have bounced a check during the month nonsense.

It doesn't connect with my bank accounts, which I don't want it to do; that also means it is well designed for trying out different scenarios. "Can I go to FabCon next month? Crap, spending that much then will put me underwater in March. Hm, what if I postpone buying that new mattress? Yeah, that works. Also, if I cut my regular households costs by five bucks a month, look what that does to my overall cash flow!" Also, it does tell you how much each (recurring) item comes to per day.

[taffimai.livejournal.com]

I adore mint! I love that everything link automatically and the reporting tools and tagging feature is awesome.

[stevenglassman.livejournal.com]

I'm a big pro-Mint person. I'm far more aware of my cash flow now than I ever was pre-mint. I used to use MS Money, but I hated having to load windows on my mac just for one program.

I've tried countless other finance programs on the mac, and none of them ever did less than irritating me.

[tzikeh.livejournal.com]

Hm.

The thing is, I want something really really simple. How much comes in, how much goes out, and what it goes out for. Don't need taxes, don't need investments, don't need to pay bills online or link it to my bank, etc.

Can Mint do *just* that and nothing else?

And I am still concerned about having my finances plugged into something that's on the internet, rather than just on my computer....

[stevenglassman.livejournal.com]

The thing is, I want something really really simple. How much comes in, how much goes out, and what it goes out for. Don't need taxes, don't need investments, don't need to pay bills online or link it to my bank, etc.

Can Mint do *just* that and nothing else?

That's how I use it. I mostly use it to see a) how much money I've got and b) where it's going to. It can show you by account or by spending category. Yes, it does investments and budgets and has all kinds of bells and whistles, but at the heart of it, I use it primarily to make sure that the money I spend is going where I *think* it's going.

And you can't do online billpay with Mint, btw- you can't move money in any fashion from mint. It's a read-only access.