Thursday, September 17, 2009

A Collection of Online Budgeting Tools

As you know, I'm a big fan of budgeting. It's helped us agree on purchases since we've gotten married, helped us not overspend, and also given us a bit of freedom to spend in a few areas. After updating our budget today, I figured I'd share our favorite online tool with you, as well as a few others that we've looked into.

PearBudget is our favorite and what we're currently using. It costs $3/month, but saves us much more than that in time, energy, and probably what we spend, too. After using our one month free trial, we knew that it worked for us and signed on up for it. It's super simple interface lets you customize as much as you need, without being confusing, and it also works well with cash or debit/credit purchases.

Mint.com is great for a lot of people I know. It's free, which is great. We've given it a try, but it just didn't fit our budgeting system. It has the added benefit of automatically pulling in transactions from your bank account, which works great if most of your purchases are made using a credit or debit card. You can also split transactions into separate categories. About the only complaint I have with Mint is that we like to carry money forward from one month to the next if there's some leftover, and I can't seem to figure out how to make this work using Mint.

Moneywell is another program I'd like to try. It's available only for Macs, and like Mint, it automatically pulls in your banking information. It claims to be a type of electronic envelope system, which sounds like it would line up well with our budgeting system. It has a free trial, which I need to use, and then a one time cost of $50.

I know there are more, but these are ones I've been impressed with in some way. Any other ideas? What do you use for budgeting?