Electronic Budgeting

Steve provided a link to his notes, which has links to all the other sites featured in Tuesday night's presentation: ideaharbor.org/budget. Some highlights:

Personally, I recommend each family complete a Cash Flow and Balance Sheet at some point, to get a good overall picture of your financial standing. For a lot of people, that's all you really need for peace of mind.

If your cash flow is positive, you probably don't need to track every expense, but it's still a good idea to know where most of your dollars go. Our favorite tool for tracking and analyzing (helping us to control) our spending is Mint.com. I recommend signing up immediately and entering your credit card (and perhaps checking account) information. Even if you don't manually input or modify transactions until the Resolution bug bites in January, you'll be building up a history of credit card expenditures. Mint is not something that needs to be typed into every day, every week, or even every month; the beauty is looking back after 6 months of not entering receipts and being able to easily see where your money went. You can also set up email or text message alerts if you go over-budget in a category.

Similarly, you can 'set it and forget it' if you're not in danger of overdraft fees: arrange for bills to be paid automatically, and automate transfers from other accounts to replenish your checking account once you have a good idea of how much you usually spend.

While not in-depth about budgeting, a good guide for getting out of debt and saving for things like retirement is Smart and Simple Financial Strategies for Busy People (not read-able online, but available from King County Library).

Different budgeting tools will appeal to different people. Please do comment here if you try any of the resources from ideaharbor.org/budget, with questions for me or encouragement for others.