Best Budgeting Program

Gnarls said:
This kind of sums it up for me. I just prefer to track my expenses at the point of sale. This way I can actively manage my monthly expenses and it makes me think about what I'm buying and why I'm buying it. I just find 22seven a bit too passive hence I like to track my investments with it. To each his own though.
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But 22Seven does track at point of sale?

Do you mean you do that manually?
 
^Yep. I like to input the amount myself. Reach for the wallet and then reach for the YNAB. If it's a big shopping trip I just save the receipts and input at home.
 
My wife and I use YNAB (you need a budget) and its revolutionised our money situation.

We combine our incomes (personal preference), and because its all synced on our PC's and phones we know EXACTLY where we stand at any point in time because we enter the spend on the fly (or sometimes after a weekend if we're lazy).
 
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Cicero said:
My wife and I use YNAB (you need a budget) and its revolutionised our money situation.

We combine our incomes (personal preference), and because its all synced on our PC's and phones we know EXACTLY where we stand at any point in time because we enter the spend on the fly (or sometimes after a weekend if we're lazy).
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Looks expensive!
 
Gnarls said:
22seven is very passive though. I prefer You Need A Budget for my monthly budgeting and use 22seven to track my investments, net worth etc.
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I use 22seven to budget, you just need to create one or am I missing something here.
 
Cius said:
Looks expensive!
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Yeah, fair enough. I bought it outright before the subscription model came out, so no monthly costs.

But even so, @ $5/month verses the amount we save in the long run by just knowing our financial state, not in retrospect but in advance or 'real time', worth it.

It takes a little while to understand wtf is going on and what works for you, but its pretty powerful once you get it. Plus getting the wifes buy-in and understanding on purchases (or non purchases) is worth that subscription price and more. Although it has got me into trouble when I buy something thats not budgeted for, coz its all there, open cards. You gotta have some leeway though.
 
Interesting Cicero.

Looks perfect. We basically have an envelope budget set up in MS Money right now but it is very manual and intermittent in terms of how we update it. I would love something similar but smart phone based so that I can allocate expenses (slips) as I incur the expense not 3 months later when I have a massive pile of slips to capture. Would also like something that can automatically integrate with my banking or at least accept bank statements in whatever that standard format is and do the basic debit order stuff automatically leaving me to just assign the more complex stuff.
 
I don't bother with anything more than Google sheets. All the other systems seem to make use of badly optimised machine learning systems that never classify things correctly.

I rather deal with controlling the supply of money than seeing where it is spent. I extensively use Capitec sub accounts to budget.

When I get paid, I divide my salary into different sub accounts.
One for my monthly grocery account.
One for fuel, prepaid electricity, prepaid phone and internet.(semi - monthly expenses)
One for savings
Investments go to a different place all together.

When my debt orders go off, I have a little remaining in my account. Then on a sunday evening I transfer out a quarter of the monthly grocery budget and put it into my main account. I then spend that as needs be.

It is basically a digital version of the envelope system.
http://www.daveramsey.com/blog/envelope-system-explained

Added bonus is that if some f***wad steals my card, they will only be able to access a very small portion of my budget (usually R100 or so)
 
Thor187 said:
I use 22seven to budget, you just need to create one or am I missing something here.
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Yeah you can but I just like YNAB. Different strokes for different folks I guess.
 
konfab said:
I don't bother with anything more than Google sheets. All the other systems seem to make use of badly optimised machine learning systems that never classify things correctly.

I rather deal with controlling the supply of money than seeing where it is spent. I extensively use Capitec sub accounts to budget.

When I get paid, I divide my salary into different sub accounts.
One for my monthly grocery account.
One for fuel, prepaid electricity, prepaid phone and internet.(semi - monthly expenses)
One for savings
Investments go to a different place all together.

When my debt orders go off, I have a little remaining in my account. Then on a sunday evening I transfer out a quarter of the monthly grocery budget and put it into my main account. I then spend that as needs be.

It is basically a digital version of the envelope system.
http://www.daveramsey.com/blog/envelope-system-explained

Added bonus is that if some f***wad steals my card, they will only be able to access a very small portion of my budget (usually R100 or so)
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I also use my Capitec accounts like this.

I just like the networth function of 22seven keeps me in check chasing digital digits
 
22seven shares a lot of it's DNA with Mint and when I was comparing the two, this lifehacker post helped.

http://lifehacker.com/budgeting-software-showdown-mint-vs-you-need-a-budget-1764607246

In my experience, Mint is best for people who want to automate their finances. It’s best for people who are too busy to calculate every penny, but could use a notification when they’re about to exceed their fast food budget. It’s great for people who want to know keep an eye on their investments, or how fast they’re paying off debt, without having to pull out a calculator every time to do it.

YNAB is best for people who want to budget meticulously and intentionally. Since you have to manually import transactions at the end of each day, YNAB isn’t very forgiving if you stop paying attention. It’s great for people who have very rigorous habits and want a tool that will let them manipulate the fine details.
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Lol, when it comes to budgeting I guess I'm the latter. I still have the paid for app so I'm unsure what I'lll be doing come end of the year. Either way, as long as we're budgeting it's all good in the hood.
 
Gnarls said:
Yeah you can but I just like YNAB. Different strokes for different folks I guess.
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Testing YNAB.

I tried 22seven but never got in to it (probably just lazy), but i'll give this a good go and see how it works.

Any advantages over 22seven - other than the fact its self hosted?
 
Can't believe how many people still use MS Money . I have been using it from Version 1 ... Decades of data now ... Can't find anything else that beats it. Thankfully still works on Windows 10! It's quite manual now that all the online stuff was cancelled. So I use a combination of MSMONEY as the reference and 22seven for 'lookups' so I open both simultaneously and populate MS Money with all the investment stuff from 22seven.

22seven has three big short comings

1. You can't track cash
2. It's a horror and monotonous process to track/allocate split an expense into sub categories. It's can't remember the splits for 'new' transactions
3. It doesn't see stuff that you have paid e.g. so it's sees my net salary going into my bank account but doesn't track the taxes, medical aid, etc that was paid on my salary slip - making using it for taxation purposes a bit incomplete.
 
22seven is great for checking how much you are spending day to day and getting a view of totals across all your accounts ...that's about it. It gets confused especially with share trading values and skews the stats too easily. Suppose if you put in the effort to manually fix transactions all the time it becomes a lot more useful.
 
Budget.Buddy said:
I think "Budget Buddy" is the answer you looking for... uses your incoming bank sms's to auto-magically track your budget and it's free. No bank login details required and specifically made for South Africans.

Check it out here https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.deesoft.mobile.budgetnow

PS: I am the developer :)
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It's a good start I guess, but it needs work.

The number of categories is far too limiting, and without being able to set it up properly and actually use it there's no way I'll be paying money for it. The process also seems extremely cumbersome, why not just offer a premium unlock with an in app purchase?
I think you need more categories and more keywords by default. In particular a telephone/cellular category is important. Also insurance.
It doesn't seem to update retroactively when I add keywords. In my opinion anything that hasn't been manually allocated should change automatically when keywords are edited.
I can't see the original SMS inside the app so I have no idea how to allocate it, especially if it shows "no words found".
 
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