I've always been impressed with how people know their spending totals at the end of the year. My budgeting system, while exacting, only looks at the present and future. If I need to move money around, I do, but I don't track that, so I'm not sure how close my variable spending line items are to reality.
But I don't want to add another manual task to my system; it works great for me but requires a lot of involvement, so I definitely don't need any more manual budget work.
So I signed up for a trial YNAB membership to see what that was about. But it seems to be a very manual process where I'd end up having to do more work. So I signed up for Mint, and I think that's much more promising. I like how it automatically captures transactions and categorizes things for you but you can change the categories. I couldn't get a couple of accounts to register (my Target RedCard is the main one), but I could probably figure out a way to categorize my payments to that card as grocery.
So we'll see. I'm definitely intrigued about it being able to track my spending so I can see my monthly or year-end totals.
Looking into automated budgeting tools (2nd of many posts today)
December 31st, 2015 at 05:13 pm