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?

Works for Me Wednesday: Remember the Milk

Following along the lines of my last WFMW post, I'd like to tell you about another favorite online tool: Remember the Milk. This is an online to-do list that I've enjoyed using over the past month or so. I first heard about it from Simple Mom, who says she uses Remember the Milk strictly for her online tasks.

Here's why Remember the Milk works for me:

• It's one convenient place to keep track of multiple to-do lists.
• It lets you add notes, due dates, priorities, and personalized list categories.
• You can share lists or individual tasks with others.

Just a side note - it may take a little bit of exploring to learn a few of the "advanced" features, like sharing. The basic features like adding tasks to lists aren't too bad, but personally I feel like there are a few aspects of the site that could be more user-friendly.

Overall though - I LOVE being able to see all my tasks in one place. My husband & I share a "This weekend" task list so we can both add to-dos before we forget, then we're able to look at the list together & discuss which ones we want to/need to do.

I hope this works for you, too! Check out my older Works for Me Wednesday posts here for more ideas, or hop on over to Kristen's blog to see all of today's WFMW posts.