Top 3 Budgeting Tools
Guest post by Brenda Lyttle
Are you tired of all the mess your budget notes and files have created and thus decided to dare yourself by living without a budget? But what about saving for your retirement or planning to send your child to the best college? You can never rule out the need for having a carefully planned budget. Use computer applications for this and you can stop worrying about the paperwork and the resulting mess. Here are the 3 computer application that are inexpensive and will prove to be a great help while planning your budget:
1. Mint
Looking for a simple effortless way of creating a budget and then adhering to it? Mint is the software you are looking for. Just enter your bank account details along with other financial info like credit card accounts, outstanding loans and mortgages, investments and insurances and Mint will do the rest for you. It will pull the data from all these accounts and create a budget for you by monitoring your incomes and expenses. If you are worried about safety, you can forget it because more than a few millions of people use this software and problems of security are unheard of. Be informed, you can’t pay bills or transfer money to other accounts through this application. This budgeting tool comes for free to top all the features that it provides!
2. You Need A Budget (YNAB)
Are you someone who is paranoid about applications automatically connecting to your bank account and retrieving data, but still want to use the services like Mint offers? YNAB should be your choice for this purpose. This program categorizes your banking data only when you have downloaded it to your system, meaning that it doesn’t connect to your bank account automatically. Once you have downloaded the financial data, this program will automatically categorize your incomes and expenses and make a budget for you.
This program requires you to pay a token amount for registration. You can always choose to take its full featured trial period (which comes for free) before you decide to pay up the amount for registration. What more, YNAB comes with a mobile app to let you monitor your budget on the move!
3. dsBudget
This is an open source multi-platform budgeting application allowing you to use it irrespective of the fact whether your computer runs Windows, Mac or Linux. This application doesn’t automatically connect to your bank account (and other financial information’s) and needs you to enter the values manually. This app is recommended for people who are paranoid about security when apps automatically retrieve sensitive financial data. The interface of this software is very simple and can be easily used with minimal knowledge of computers.
Maintaining an efficient household budget, monitoring it and adhering to it are the secrets to an affluent lifestyle!
Brenda Lyttle is a finance expert, with expertise in budgeting and offering advice on how to get truly free credit reports.
