My only budget app success story – but to be honest, I haven’t been great about remembering to always input my spending: Goodbudget. However, it seems possible to make using this a habit, which is more than I can say for the other apps I’ve tried.
What I like (though my particular case might cause me to celebrate different features than others would!)
-The free version suffices – no need to pay for premium, at least for what I’m looking for
-I can share the app with my husband (we have shared expenses) and this doesn’t require any syncing between accounts (which often doesn’t work, at least for me with my very old Android!) To share, you simply both log in with the same username and password.
-I don’t have to sync my bank account, bank cards, etc. I can instead manually add an entry every time I buy food/order takeout. I prefer this because a) syncing often doesn’t seem to work well for me, and if it does, the categorisation doesn’t work so I then have to go through and recategorise everything after the fact which just adds to the admin burden! b) the act of physically inputting what I’ve spent seems to hold me accountable/act as a mild deterrent to excessive eating out
-I could imagine adding other “envelopes” to track other spending categories once I’ve got this one down – the app seems to work fairly smoothly and it’s quick and easy to add my transactions.
Quick thought: Monzo pots function similar to the envelope thing you mentioned—https://monzo.com/pots. When your salary comes in, you could use the salary sorter ( https://monzo.com/salary-sorter/ , split it in the app across bills, savings, spending, subscriptions, donations etc. If the next month there’s consistently lots left in eg. the bills or spending pot that hasn’t been used, that might be a sign to consider changing the proportions. The categories might also be useful for tracking spending—if you’re not on the free version then you can edit them and add new ones. There might be downsides to switching bank accounts though/ other reasons this isn’t a good solution!
My only budget app success story – but to be honest, I haven’t been great about remembering to always input my spending: Goodbudget. However, it seems possible to make using this a habit, which is more than I can say for the other apps I’ve tried.
What I like (though my particular case might cause me to celebrate different features than others would!)
-The free version suffices – no need to pay for premium, at least for what I’m looking for
-I can share the app with my husband (we have shared expenses) and this doesn’t require any syncing between accounts (which often doesn’t work, at least for me with my very old Android!) To share, you simply both log in with the same username and password.
-I don’t have to sync my bank account, bank cards, etc. I can instead manually add an entry every time I buy food/order takeout. I prefer this because a) syncing often doesn’t seem to work well for me, and if it does, the categorisation doesn’t work so I then have to go through and recategorise everything after the fact which just adds to the admin burden! b) the act of physically inputting what I’ve spent seems to hold me accountable/act as a mild deterrent to excessive eating out
-I could imagine adding other “envelopes” to track other spending categories once I’ve got this one down – the app seems to work fairly smoothly and it’s quick and easy to add my transactions.
Quick thought: Monzo pots function similar to the envelope thing you mentioned—https://monzo.com/pots. When your salary comes in, you could use the salary sorter ( https://monzo.com/salary-sorter/ , split it in the app across bills, savings, spending, subscriptions, donations etc. If the next month there’s consistently lots left in eg. the bills or spending pot that hasn’t been used, that might be a sign to consider changing the proportions. The categories might also be useful for tracking spending—if you’re not on the free version then you can edit them and add new ones. There might be downsides to switching bank accounts though/ other reasons this isn’t a good solution!