The 2011 Budget promises to return Australia to surplus by 2013, but for individuals, the devil is in the immediate detail. Here’s Lifehacker’s rundown of the key changes that will affect your wallet. More »
SpendingDiary is a simple, functional web-based expense tracker that tags expenditures, generates reports, and gives good data on your money flow. The site has a completely functional demonstration account available—a nice touch that makes it really easy to test drive without handing over an email address. SpendingDiary has a simple interface—for every entry you assign a name, a category, and the amount you spent. You can generate reports for the day, week, month, or a custom date range, and your expenses displayed in a slick pie graph, broken into the tags you’ve set up. Your data is also exportable to other formats, including the ever-friendly CSV.
SpendingDiary [via MakeUseOf]The Wall Street Journal walks through its own Budgeting 101 course, examining what makes a budget so hard to stick to and how to create realistic budgets that actually fit your fluctuating spending habits. Think about your life for a moment. Do you make the exact same purchases every single month? Of course not. What you buy differs from one month to the next. Yet many people use the “average cost per month” approach to budgeting, so that in any given month they can spend an average of $150 on clothes, and an average of $100 on a vacation, and an average of $300 on eating out, and so on.
Windows and Linux only: Money Manager Ex is a an open source, cross platform alternative to commercial software like Microsoft Money or Quicken. While it isn’t as flashy as some of the commercial software on the market, it is robust and feature-packed for being small and portable. Money Manager Ex has the basics covered like managing multiple checking, savings, credit card, and loan accounts. You can generate a variety of reports to see how your expenses stack up against your income, the gain versus loss in your investments, and upcoming bills and expenses. Money Manager Ex includes a budget manager which, while sorely lacking the ability to make new entries in the budget, has dozens of existing entries which should cover most situations. Money Manager Ex is a free download for Windows and Linux only. Thanks, VaraHuman>!
Money Manager Ex [CodeLathe]If you got paid today and you seem to have more money than usual, don’t be in a huge rush to spend it. Australian IT reports that a technical error by Westpac meant that a large batch of payroll transactions were processed twice, resulting in double the amount of money going into bank accounts. (Non-Westpac customers are also significantly affected, as the pay could potentially go into any Australian bank account specified by the recipient.)Westpac is working to reclaim the money, so if you go out and spend it before it gets redrawn, you’ll just end up with a slanging match with your bank next week. Of course, if you’ve got a well-organised budget system that includes moving money automatically into relevant accounts as it arrives, there’ll be less to worry about.
Web-based account manager Zefty helps kids understand spending and parents manage what they owe the little ones. Manually or automatically “deposit” money into kids’ accounts, and they (and you) can see what they’ve saved. If your tyke’s tech-proficient, they get their own login to enter what they withdrew and why, but parents get a super-user account as well. There’s also “Zefty Checks” kids can request money with, and an allowance calculator that determines a reasonable pay rate. Zefty is free to use, requires a sign-up. Zefty [via eHub]
It’s easy to start thinking about cash and spending as liquid, who-cares concepts while on vacation, but sticking to a budget can be as easy as sticking a piece of paper in your wallet. As guest poster Debbie Dubrow points out at the Get Rich Slowly financial blog: Keep the cash for the day separate from the rest of your cash. For example, you get $300 out of the ATM and you want that to last you 4 days, so that’s $75/day. Put $75 in an easy to access part of your wallet and you put the rest in a harder to reach spot. If you see yourself going into the hard-to-reach spot, you know you’re going over budget.
The Dumb Little Man blog has a suggestion for all of us who can’t help but feel the shameful pull of the drive-thru lane when we’re hungry or just pressed for meal-planning time. Every night, empty your fast food (or candy, soda, or other junk food) receipts into a jar by your bed. Then … Round that up to the nearest $10 and cut it in half. That’s how much you’ll spend a week from now on … Take that money and put it in a ziplock bag that you keep in your car. All your fast food will be paid for out of this fund, and when it dries up, that’s it until next week. This will force you to ration and make choices.
Personal Finance blog Funny About Money tweaks the concept of a “freedom account”—a single stash for irregular-but-common expenses like car repair and clothing—and comes up with targeted accounts. That means opening up a money market or similar small account for each kind of expense, based on how often it occurs, rather than track a bunch of expenses from a big fund. For example, I look to the irregular little surprises that can happen at any time (plumbing or car repairs, vet bills, etc.), annual expenses (car and home owner’s insurance, property tax, income tax), and long-term expenses (purchase of a new car, about once every ten years; major repairs or renovations on the house, which I hope don’t happen more often than about once every eight or ten years).
That way, the author states, big walloping expenses like car repair don’t throw off your budget and give you a clearer view at what you’re spending. Targeting your emergency savings [Funny About Money]
