Budgeting

[deanb]

Boring topic, but we're getting older. What/how do you guys use to manage finances and budgets? Getting to the age where I figured regardless of bleak outlook putting stuff aside for a pension is probably a good idea. Among other stuff. Atm I live mainly month to month and probably could easily save a few pounds here n there. I used to be pretty good, but bank shifted to digital and I don't really get a monthly birds eye view of expenses anymore.

 

I gave the YNAB trial a go though it seems you need to watch a bunch of videos to learn the "thinking" to use it, never mind something that teaches you how the software functions. Probably more orientated towards like businesses anyway.

 

I had used one of the Android apps, but was a bit of a pain and its categorisation kinda sucked (assumes a somewhat specific lifestyle I guess).

 

Might sod it all and set something up in Excel but I'd have to dig deep into my knowledge. Once digitised the monthly accounts for a pub, but that's a long time ago.

[danielpholt]

Aside from checking my bank app once a day I don't really do any, not that it'd make much difference if I did. You can give me all the budgeting software in the world, but if I'm bad at not spending money, it's not going to help.

[TheFlyingGerbil]

Have you checked your bank's website? My banks website has a money planning option, you have to activate it but it categorises your spending automatically, or you can manually alter it.

 

You should use it to see what proportion of your outgoings are necessary and which are discretionary. subtract the necessary ones (utilities, rent, travel etc.) from your income, then look at the other stuff and see what's important, what can be cut down and what can go (or be spent if you have extra money). One good thing is to set up a standing order for a savings account as if you take the money out of your current account you're much less likely to spend it

[TheMightyEthan]

My wife handles all our budgeting, she just tells me how much we're allowed to spend on things.  We each get an allowance each month that we can spend on whatever the fuck we want, so we don't have issues of "you spend too much money on videogames" or whatever.  It works really well.

[Thursday Next]

Don't have a budget. Feel like I should. :/

[deanb]

Oh I actually ended up finding a site that does a couple of budget spreadsheets (in various formats too, I grabbed an ODS version for a non-family budget).

That's the big thing I guess with looking into this is a lot of stuff cater towards an American budgeting for a family, which means stuff like health plans n kids, n what not. 

 

This is what I ended up getting but they've a bunch.

http://www.vertex42.com/ExcelTemplates/personal-monthly-budget.html

 

I tweaked it a bit since my bills come from one place, and  don't have like credit cards to pay off or a car. I might completely rework it over the months. (oh I also can't get it to use £ for the value at the top but I guess doesn't matter too much)

[madbassman39]

I use my own system, which is fairly non existent. I'm trying to use Mint.com which works pretty well. My bank doesn't like it so I have to re-log in constantly, but for a few days it works.

[Mr. GOH!]

My wife and I use YNAB and it's great (although the phone app for Android doesn't sync with dropbox correctly, so I have to use a computer).

 

It's mostly useful for my wife and our household budget, since my individual budget is essentially eaten up by rent and massive student debt payments because fuck you fancy law school.

[SomTervo]

We worked out our joint bills and shared costs for the flat, made a joint account, and started paying our split cost into this account. All of our bills, rent and food costs come out of this joint account. 

 

This means that everything left over in our individual current accounts is basically extra money. But obviously you want to save, so we each also have our own individual saving's accounts, which we have money organised to go into each month.

 

So, from my perspective:

 

Current Account > all my pay goes in here.

 

Joint Account > a standing order, on the last day of the month, moves my life-support fees from Current Account into Joint 

 

Current Account > all that's left here now is my non-survival money. My 'leisure income'  

 

Savings Account > a standing order moves the amount I roughly want to save per month from Current into Savings

 

Current account > I'm left with approximate daily balance – my monthly pay minus savings and monthly life-support.

 

This means you can check 'Current Account balance' and get a much more accurate, meaningful representation of how much you're spending and how much is left standing in there. I guess the only downside is I make less interest on each of the accounts? 

 

I reckon you could do the above by yourself, using multiple bank accounts for yourself, within 30-45 minutes. Online banking makes it really easy to set up extra bank accounts. Just set up a new Current Account for your bills, and a new Savings Account for your pension/general savings, and organise standing orders to move the amounts you need around per month. This would only take 30-45 minutes physically, but that obviously doesn't count the front-end time to work out your budgets and how much you want to save.

 

I find this system is useful from a functional standpoint and a psychological standpoint. My problem with apps or budgeting software was that I could never be bothered/never had the attention to check it frequently and input all my data, but with the multi-account system, you only have to do the budget data once for your 'bills account', set up your accounts and standing orders, then everything takes care of itself. For months on end. Obviously sometimes there might be a bills jump - say in a cold winter - but then you can easily just move some money over into your bills account.

 

As an aside, I also have a credit card - I just use that for any large payments (eg for home appliances, consoles, holidays) so that I can stagger those larger payments (eg pay £40 a month instead of £250 in one go). Also a plus for the credit rating, oh yeah.

[Pojodin]

Working with a financial advisor for investments and feeding what I can into the 401k equivalent through work. The rest is just keeping an eye on bank accounts and limiting non-essential expenses. It helps that I have a relatively cheap diet and work out a bunch.