What secret tips and techniques are there that average people can learn from to maintain a financially healthy lifestyle? The creators of myBudget believe they have the answer, a rather simple common-sense tip and robust web app that can help you succeed in it. So what is the secret then? Stop wasting money, know where your money is coming and going, and make your money work for you. myBudget is a straightforward web app that allows you to do all of the above by tracking all your expenses in a familiar iPhone-friendly environment.
A couple weeks ago we mentioned Harvest, a web-based app ideal for mobile workers and teams who need to track expenses or time on projects. myBudget is an application more personalized for the individual, a personal finance tool that can help you track all your spendings straight from your iPhone.
In myBudget, you begin by creating groups such as “home,” “food,” “utilities,” etc., and choose your budget, or how much you plan to spend during a given period, whether daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly. Once you have your groups set up, you create smaller categories within these groups that pertain to transactions you make within the groups they are in. For example, I have a group “Home” with categories “Gas,” “Groceries,” and “Rent.” In my “Personal” group I have “Entertainment” and “Haircuts,” among others. The purpose is to track all of your expenses, to know where your money is going with each of your transactions, so there may be many categories to keep track of.
Once you set up all your categories, you can begin adding in your transactions. Each transaction you give a name, an amount, date, which category you want to put it in and any particular comments about it, useful if you want to note things such as check numbers after buying groceries for example. Every transaction you add will decrease from the total budget you allocated to the specific group you added the transaction to. As long as you allocate as much as you want to spend, you can then observe exactly how much you have remaining and how much of a dent you are putting into your budget with each transaction.
After everything is in place you can use the Reports section to not only see your total amount of transactions made in each of your groups but also an automatically updated pie-chart that displays your overall budget and exactly how much of your entire budget each group represents. You can view your data in daily, weekly, monthly or yearly reports so you can compare and see how much you spend on average and perhaps if you have any extra savings made by eliminating some of your unnecessary transactions.
myBudget is a great concept for a web app because users can easily update their transactions on-the-fly, not only useful but almost necessary to keep up with our own daily lives and to maintain our motivation to keep track of our finances. It is not perfect however, as of right now it only supports English and German languages, and dollars, euros, pounds and yen. Transactions use the day/month/year format and cannot be changed without your reports not displaying properly, which may cause some confusion if you are not used to this format. Groups and your budget can be edited at any time but categories and unfortunately transactions can only be deleted, so if you make a mistake you will have to remake the entire thing. The creators state that your privacy is one of their main concerns, but those of you still skeptical can still make use of the app without any kind of sensitive personal information outside of your daily transactions.
As a free personal finance tool, myBudget does a good job of keeping you up to date with all your various expenditures. With an appropriate and familiar interface and the ability to be used on your iPhone or iPod touch, it can help you maintain a closer eye on your funds and may even help you start saving more of your money and eliminating your unnecessary spending.
myBudget - Expanse tracking for iPhone and iPod touch
www.moneyisred.com
Add a comment (None yet)
