Hi everyone, was playing around with pocketbook and MoneyBrilliant recently to track spending and budgets and was wondering if there was anything else I should check out.
MoneyBrilliant seems to have a lot more functionality but the $100 a year subscription is leaving me to look at other options. (If any)
Any advice or apps I should know about that anyone can share?
Thanks in advance
they get you in when you sign up initially and you have a 'free trial' of the subscription but when it runs out a month later all the time and effort you've spent setting up all of your accounts and tracking your tax and relabelling everything etc you get stripped away unless you pay.
I'll check out Isavemoney, thanks for the tip
I have used MoneyBrilliant and I have paid for the premium service and cancelled it so I can understand not wanting to pay money for something like that. But it's not ironic to pay money for a budgeting service. If you have bad money habits and need help it is reasonable to pay a few dollars per week to right the ship.
Besides, the premium service is optional. The free version usually does everything you need. As OP said, the service has a lot of functionality. I have used a few budget tracking apps and MoneyBrilliant is the best I have come across personally. Occasionally I will be interested in a premium feature and then I will pay for one month only. That way it costs maybe $20 a year.
thats good to know you can opt in for a month / especially handy for the tax time
We've used YNAB for the past 10 years. We're on grandfathered pricing of US$45/year but it looks like new subscriptions are US$84/year!
They have a 34 day free trial.
There isn't any automatic syncing for Australian accounts & credit cards but we use export/import functions and transaction coding is quite quick after that as it autofills categories based on previous coding.
I've just recently started using GnuCash. Haven't gotten into it enough to recommend it, but it seems pretty feature-ful, flexible and not overly hard to get going.
It's FLOSS, so it's got that going for it, which is nice. There's an Android app too.
Try Debit & Credit for iOS and Mac. It is $20 per year and allows sharing of accounts and budgets via iCloud with your family.
Google sheets. It is free.
I can also recommend YNAB, while the price can seem steep I find it fair. You could pay monthly until you have enough buffer to purchase the yearly subscription
Table below is my listed from the first 10 pages of this search, kept sorted by relevance. Comments were manually counted so may be slightly off in places.
| Date | Topic + Link | Comments |
|---|---|---|
| 23/06/2020 | Help Creating a Budget Please | 28 |
| 10/04/2012 | Android Budgeting App eg My Budget Book | 1 |
| 16/08/2018 | Budget/Goal Tracking App (iOS if possible) | 5 |
| 17/01/2018 | Budget App That Gives Me Future Net Cash Requirement? | 8 |
| 12/06/2017 | How do you Budget? | 44 |
| 03/09/2014 | Free personal finance/budget tools | 11 |
procketbook / frollo is another
Into my 20th year this year with Microsoft Money! Its not feature rich, its clunky, I use parallels to run it on a Mac these days but it works for me and I am so used to it dont think I could make the change now if I wanted to.
Dont waste your life counting last weeks spending. You only need to 'track' your expenses until you know what the regular ones are, which should be ~3 months + the annual ones. After that it should be planning for future spending, not continuing to track what you have already done, you cant change it. Once you know what expenses are coming, allocate predictable expense dollars to an account and auto deduct from there, link a debit (credit) card if it helps - that will now auto track these costs on your statement. For regular variable expenses (food, fuel, fun) put some cash in your pocket each week, or again have a separate debit card, and when its gone, its gone, until next week. (do you really need to track this ? ). Allocate the rest to emergency, short term and long term savings and/or debt repayment. Repeat for 3 - 6 months, review statements, refine then review annually.
The Irony of a Budget app wanting an annual fee of $100…
"isavemoney" isn't too bad, fiddly initially.