You’ve started to budget your money, but how are you tracking your spending? If you’re not tracking and checking your spending habits you can’t effectively manage your budget.
Some banks help keep track of your spending habits, however, you can better analyze your spending habits with these tools. Now that checkbooks are dead some of us have to adapt to new methods.
Manual Spreadsheets
The most frugal and time-consuming way to manage your expenses is through the use of spreadsheets. There are several free templates to use, or you could make one yourself. The goal of a tracking spreadsheet is to analyze your regular spending and budget progress.
The benefit of tracking your expenses yourself is having to type in and physically analyze every dollar you spend. The drawback of using spreadsheets is having to remember to type it in and keep up with all your data!
Wally
An easy to use, free budget tracker, Wally is available on Android and iOS to track your expenses on the go. This app can compile a wide variety of banking accounts together in one place, making it easy to watch all of your money.
Wally lets you take snapshots of your receipts and will track your spending for you, or if you wish you can still enter in the expense manually. Wally is great for virtual tracking by breaking down your spending into categories and helping you monitor how you are spending.
YNAB – You Need A Budget
Free to try, YNAB is a $12/month budgeting service that will help you plan your spending dollar for dollar. The budgeting software is designed to limit frivolous spending and give purpose to each expense. You Need A Budget boasts its users save hundreds of dollars in as little as two months.
This is a different type of budget tracker but is definitely worth a try. It does have a desktop interface but is also available on all major mobile devices.
Mint
A very popular budget tracking tool, Mint has been around since the dawn of quicken. Mint has set the standard for virtual budget trackers. You can watch all of your account balances in one place, and monitor categories. All of your data is gathered by Mint to display your spending, regular bills, and cash flow.
While it is great at syncing all of your banking data, Mint doesn’t give the user too many input options to control their budget. There are little options for tracking, but Mint does do a great job of displaying all of your spending in easy-to-see categories.
Analyze Your Data
Once you’ve started tracking your spending you can analyze your data. What are you spending the most on? What splurges do you fall victim to most frequently? Are there purchases you can cut out?
Simply tracking the expense isn’t enough, using tools to analyze your spending habits will help you gain full control of your budget.
See more money-saving tips here from TheDealExperts
