I need something I can access both at work and at home because I do my budget updates and adjustments whenever I can fit them in. I've been using saved draft emails in my Yahoo account. It was free, and I could access it anywhere there was Internet access. The drawbacks were that I had to do all my calculations myself, creating more room for error, and that Yahoo occasionally freaked out when I tried to save things. The last time it messed up one of my documents, I got fed up. AS told me about my new favorite online tool...
Google documents! It's great--you log in from the Google home page and you can upload or create Word docs or Excel spreadsheets. I opted to change all my draft-email documents into spreadsheets so the program would do my math for me from now on. It didn't take long to figure out how to do that. Everything's so much easier to read, too, since I can use different cells, boldface, colors and text alignment to enhance readability. I'm sure I'll have to iron out some kinks someday, but the first day on it has been wonderful.
I recommend it if someone's just trying to track simple things, like budgeting a month out--that's the main thing I track: income in and expenses out for about a month and a half in advance. I also have separate spreadsheets for tracking total household debt broken out by individual debt, short-term (fun money) savings, and a generic monthly budget that lists paychecks, bills and allotted money and shows what should be left over in a perfect world.
My new, free budgeting tool
January 8th, 2008 at 06:36 pm
January 8th, 2008 at 06:57 pm 1199818670
I found a PDA program that has worked beautifully over the years for me, so I can do my personal finance stuff right off my cellphone, even when I am away from a computer and internet access.
However, anything beyond that, such as bill paying, ACH transfers, and more, then I use Google as well. Specifically, iGoogle. I have one tab that contains all the financial news from several websites there, and another tab containing all the quick market summaries and investment tools there.
Oh, and I also recommend their Google notebook for note-taking. Oh yeah, and there's googlepages if you feel the need to make free web pages. Wow. Should've bought stock in Google from way back then eh?
January 8th, 2008 at 08:24 pm 1199823853
January 12th, 2008 at 05:06 pm 1200157591
February 2nd, 2008 at 10:31 pm 1201991508
June 9th, 2008 at 01:13 am 1212970431
You are immediately given a great looking, easy to use straight forward budget page, and you can also generate monthly reports to your e-mail for safe keeping before end-of-month closing and starting a new month. The budget categories are not user modifiable but the set is very rich and flexible covering just about any practical category plus a few catch all miscellaneous category, not a bad deal for a free utility. And there is an instant super easy to use online users billboard that holds discussions among users and the developer too.
The website is at:
http://www.myexp.org/OOTD_gate.php
Happy budgeting.