There’s no shortage of budgeting apps out there, but sometimes, rather than futzing with categories, charts, graphs and daily alerts that you’re over a pre-set budget or have “irregular spending” in a certain category, you just want something simple to track the money you’re spending.
DollarBird fills this gap. Users manually fill in their monthly budget and expenditures on a calendar, and in this way, it’s a great app for actually tracking and cataloguing your expenses. Instead of looking at a summary an app is providing for you, you’re filling in each expense yourself.
The app is easy and intuitive to use. With the free version, you input a monthly budget, and then each day you can add expenditures (or income) to the calendar as if you’re adding an event to your iCal. You can also note what you spent the money on, and the app categorises it for you, and you can review your transactions by day, week, month or category.
You can upgrade to a $US4.99 ($6.93) per month or $US39.99 ($55.53) per year version that gives you access to more calendars (which would let you track different accounts) and lets you collaborate with other people.
As someone who has a hard sticking with a money app, I’ve been enjoying using this because it mimics something I’ve been doing in my planner already. Unlike my planner, though, my phone is always with me, meaning I can catch the small expenses I might forget about otherwise.
This isn’t the case for everyone, so use what works for you, but I find that relying on Mint invariably means I’m ostrich-ing every now and then, avoiding opening the app. With DollarBird, it’s become more of a habit to input the money I’m spending and be aware of where I could make changes.
And the best part, if you’re wary of connecting all of your various financial accounts to an app, is that you don’t have to connect anything. You’re manually inputting the info. Not only are things not getting mischaracterised, but you don’t need to worry about the app collecting all of your private financial information.
Again, use what works you; I like the simplicity of DollarBird.
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