The Money Mustache Community
Learning, Sharing, and Teaching => Ask a Mustachian => Topic started by: unplugged on March 13, 2013, 08:46:51 PM
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I'm having the worse time tracking my spending and fail every year by March. I don't want to just track and budget. I want to also really study utilities, gasoline, groceries.......and really be able to learn from the numbers.
I want to track my spending the way Millionaire Victoria did on the TLC show Cheapskates etc.. Her tracking goes back for years. Does anyone know what she was using or a similar program? I have an older Mac and free would be my goal. That may be asking for too much though?
Thanks if you know of a program.
PS I did terrible with Iphone aps. The screen was too small and hard to navigate. I could not really work well with the numbers. I am a spread sheet gal :) I want to use Mint but it wont work for a few reasons for me at this time.
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Why does it have to be a program? I'd recommend a plain ol' spreadsheet.
More flexible than a dedicated program, and then you have so many more choices, because you can use any spreadsheet designed on Windows, Mac, whatever (and not just something designed for OS X).
LibreOffice works on OS X and is free, and then just pick the Excel spreadsheet you like (there's a million out there).
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As recommended above, a spreadsheet will be your cheapest and most flexible. It will also, however, take the most work to set up.
I use (and think is fantastic), YNAB (http://www.youneedabudget.com/). It's not cheap though, and has a bit of a learning curve.
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I use both a spreadsheet I have used for years and mint which I started using last year. Spreadsheet still works great and is future proof, etc. Mint just gives me some information that I would be too lazy to keep track of myself.
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I want to also really study utilities, gasoline, groceries.......and really be able to learn from the numbers.
Why study those? What can you learn that will have any relevance to what you do from this point onward?
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Will has a good point. Past information is of very little use beyond setting your initial budget and tracking progress (to make you feel good).
If all you want is to set an initial budget, you could set up Mint and have it go through your past 6 months or so, or you could do the last 2 months manually via your bank/cc statements.
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If you don't want to use Mint, and want a program instead, you can try Gnucash, but it is VERY technical when compared to an easy option like mint. Still, if you want a separate program, you might like it. You might also like it if you are like me and want everything to be "just right" in your tracking. It will take a little while to learn the system for it though, especially if you are not used to double data entry accounting.
http://www.gnucash.org/