I've tried a variety of tools over the years and always end up going back to a low tech approach: spreadsheets. I set up my credit cards to email me after every transaction, which I then manually copy over to my spreadsheet with additional category information. Pivot tables give me a breakdown by category / month.
The added friction of having to manually copy everything over is a nice incentive to buy less stuff.
yeah big +1 to this. People are obsessed with automation, but doing a bit of manual work for stuff like budgeting and project management actually really helps cement it mentally I think (a bit like hand writing lecture notes, etc).
Spreadsheet + Pivot table is all you need in many cases.
Comments
I've tried a variety of tools over the years and always end up going back to a low tech approach: spreadsheets. I set up my credit cards to email me after every transaction, which I then manually copy over to my spreadsheet with additional category information. Pivot tables give me a breakdown by category / month.
The added friction of having to manually copy everything over is a nice incentive to buy less stuff.
yeah big +1 to this. People are obsessed with automation, but doing a bit of manual work for stuff like budgeting and project management actually really helps cement it mentally I think (a bit like hand writing lecture notes, etc).
Spreadsheet + Pivot table is all you need in many cases.