10 Online Budget Tools
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There are a lot of free online budget tools available to help you manage your money. As you know from previous posts, spending less than you make is the most important habit to develop if you’re seeking some degree of financial freedom. Along with good advice from readers and other bloggers, I’ve assembled a growing list of painless money-saving tips, and I’ve described my simple approach to budgeting. In this post, I’ll take a look at some free online tools you can use to help gain control of your money. So let’s get to it.
Online Budget Tools
Mint is quickly becoming one of my favorite online tools. If you’ve not heard of it, Mint is a free online money management tool. Once you sign up, Mint allows you to link your checking, savings and credit card accounts to your Mint account. Once linked, all of your transactions are automatically incorporated into your Mint account. To do this, you do have to provide Mint with the username and password you use to access your various accounts. This has been a cause of concern for some, although it’s not stopped me from using Mint. Mint uses Yodlee to manage the security of this information, which is the same company used by Fidelity and Bank of America. You can read more about the security of your information here.
What I like about Mint is that the transactions are downloaded automatically and categories are assigned to most transactions by Mint. This does take some adjustments at first, but over time, much of the work is done by Mint, not be me. With the information downloaded to Mint, I can then focus on my spending for whatever expense categories I like. Here is what the budget section of my Mint screen looks like today:
This shows me how much I’ve spent as compared to the average amount I spend (as calculated by Mint based on an analysis of my spending patterns) each month. Based on the day of the month, Mint determines if I’m on my way to spending more or less than I should. In just a few seconds, I can check the status of the spending categories I’ve chosen to keep an eye on.
In addition to Mint, here are some other online options to consider:
Buxfer: “Our goal is to create the best personal finance application on the web. Money is typically not the topic of discussion for a group of twenty-somethings wanting to have fun with their lives. But that’s only because today’s finance applications make it difficult and boring. That’s what we have set about to change! We want people to effortlessly understand their finances. And have fun while doing so.”
BudgetTracker: “We allow you to track your Budget, Bills, Transactions and tie all these together in an easy to read Calendar that can send you reminders when Bills are due. You can also view most of the data stored on this site with your Cellular Phone so you can take all your data with you where ever you may be.”
BudgetPulse: “BudgetPulse is built on principles of simplicity, user friendliness and comprehensiveness. As the application is easy to use, it is especially useful for people to manage and monitor their financial condition. For security reasons, we do not and have no intention to link direct to users’ banking account data.”
Expensr: “See how much of your money goes to Food or Gas. Then compare your spending with similar people so you know where to improve. Create budgets to stay on track and use our forecasting tools to avoid any financial surprises. It’s all free, easy-to-use, and takes only a couple of minutes a day.”
PearBudget: “PearBudget is a FREE budgeting program, written in Excel. It can be used by almost any spreadsheet program (Excel, Word, OpenOffice, etc.). Setting it up is a snap, and you can input your data during the commercial breaks of a single episode of your favorite show. (And—did we mention?—it’s free!)”
Billster: “A totally free online application developed to organise your personal and shared expenses.”
Mvelopes Personal : “Mvelopes Personal is the most effective online personal finance and spending management system ever. This revolutionary, award-winning system applies innovative financial software technology to the traditional envelope method of budgeting to help you manage your finances, while living within your income - and most of it’s done automatically!” NOTE: unlike the tools above, Mvelopes is not free, although they do offer a free trial which you can begin using by clicking Mvelopes Personal
(affiliate link).
Free Excel Budget Templates
If you prefer spreadsheets over online software, there are several free budget templates available from Microsoft. If you run on a Mac as I do, your options are more limited.
Windows Excel Templates: Here you’ll find more than 30 free budget templates available to download. The templates include personal budgets, even budgeting, and even a wedding budget template.
Mactopia: For the Mac, Microsoft offers Mactopia, where you can search for templates by product. Microsoft offers just 35 templates in total, a few of which are for budgets. The selection is not as large, but there are some viable options.
If you know of a great online tool or Excel template, please leave a comment and I’ll add it to the list.
38 Comments, Comment or Ping
Frank
I find myself drooling over the screen shots of mint when I see them, yet I can’t get over the security risk of giving them all of my account access information.
Obviously you haven’t had any problems, but what do you think about the safety of the site and your data?
Nov 9th, 2007
shadox
can anyone explain to me how any of these sites are better than Quicken? The fact that all this financial information is centralized in one place on the web is a scary proposition. Never mind the risk of hackers - I don’t want any single company to have that much information about me. My consolidated financial statements are a map of my life. I am the only one that should be holding that particular map.
Nov 10th, 2007
DR
Shadox, I’ve used Quicken’s budget function and have never cared for it. I guess everybody has their own preferences, but I find something like Mint much easier to use. As for data security, that’s worth being concerned about, but Mint uses the same security that Fidelity and others use.
Nov 10th, 2007
KBP
I tried Mint and HATED it. It showed multiple transactions for the same merchant and so I always thought I had much less money than I thought and I was freaking out because I thought I was bouncing checks. Closed my account today as a matter of fact. If you go on their boards you will see that they have TONS of bugs and it seems to take them forever to fix them.
How much are they paying you to endorse their product?
Feb 22nd, 2008
DR
KBP, interesting that you conclude somebody must be paying me to endorse a product simply because you don’t like it. Should I conclude that a Mint competitor is paying you to roam the blogosphere leaving comments critical of Mint? That being said, I think you raise a valid criticism of Mint, and hopefully they will improve it. I still like the product. And to answer your question, no, none of my opinions on tDR is paid for.
Feb 22nd, 2008
chris mccoy
i think this sucks
Feb 27th, 2008
Alison
transactions. I’ve recently started using the envelope system and am paying for gas and groceries with cash. Looking at mint, I appear to be way under budget for grocery purchases but I know that I’ve spent an additional $XX since the last time I used my debit card. Looking at their boards, they are not planning on changing that any time soon.
So, I’m making notes on the other nine mentioned in your post, looking at pros and cons to see if I can find the product that bridges the gap between what I have with mint and what I need to successfully budget and track my spending.
I really appreciate this post.
Mar 20th, 2008
Alison
Oh, jeez, I cut off the top of my post. Doh! The first line should have been the following:
“I have had great experiences with mint. My only issue is that I can’t add manual transactions.”
Mar 20th, 2008
nathan
Wondering when online banking would evolve - I thought: “Wouldn’t it be nice if banks just added folders and rules to their online apps”
For instance - I get the same amount of cash each month for my paycheck. If I could set up “folders” which are not necessarily seperate accounts, just dividers if you will, and then set up a rule to put x amount in folder 1, y in folder 2, etc. That way can manage money and make contributions to the “new car fund” and still not actually remove the money from my account, just in case I screw things up (frequent). At any time I could empty a folder back into the main account or transfer it’s contents to a new account. Like virtual savings. I could put 100 in the “eat out” folder. Now I can check my account online and apply a transaction to a folder which would deduct from it…
any thoughts?
Apr 2nd, 2008
Harei Edom
There is a new online free web utility for personal budgeting that offers the simplicity and anonymity that no other online service currently has. Readers of this article would like to know about “Out Of The Dark” at:
http://www.myexp.org/OOTD_gate.php
I have used it for 2 month now and it’s a dream solution for online personal budgeting, almost too good to be free.
Apr 9th, 2008
Chaka
@Alison, currently, the method to track cash in Mint is to go into a cash withdrawal, then split the transaction… then you can have the cash withdrawal divided up into how you spent it…
Apr 11th, 2008
ronnie
I recently launched a site to accommodate my families personal budget needs. Thought it was a good enough idea that I would invest in hosting. We are adding new features every few days as we get good feedback. All registrations are anonymous and the 30-day trial is fully functional. I’d be interested in getting more people to test the site, and appreciate your feedback.
http://www.mywifesmoney.com
Apr 19th, 2008
Megdelana
It seems to me that most of these websites are geared towards people who are making more money than me. My monthly income is $1500 and I really need a good budgeting tool. I pay only for the basics like rent, electricity, food and transportation. Is there a simple budget tool for me?
Sep 15th, 2008
DR
Megdelana, my suggestion would be to create a simple Excel spreadsheet. That’s what I use and it works great. The link to Excel spreadsheet templates in the article will take you to some functional templates to get you started.
Sep 16th, 2008
Luke
NeoBudget (http://www.neobudget.com) is a great online envelope-based budget management system. It doesn’t collect any account information, so there isn’t the same security risk as with Mint or some of the other sites. It has many great features like income management and goals, importing transactions, reports, and a lot more. I would classify it as a mid-level budget program — it’s not completely dumbed down, but it doesn’t require an accounting degree to figure it out.
Nov 13th, 2008
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