My wife and I have a pretty simple method. First, we each have our own bank accounts with our own spending money. Then, we have a joint account that we use for bills. Finally, we have a separate bank that we use for groceries and gas.
With these allocated separately, we can each have our own spending money, and have enough in every other account to take care of what we need. The paycheck just gets split between these in different direct deposit amounts.
The most important thing is to understand your costs, plan them out, and be aware of what comes out and when. Then, you just follow that plan. The biggest part is making sure you know that you can only spend exactly that much on yourself, which is where our individual accounts come in handy. Whatever we want to buy, we can, because we know safely that our needs are taken care of.
Since we have our math to allow more money in than money out, each account (minus our spending ones) accrue their own savings, and can be transferred between at any time. Overall, it works for us.
I import my transactions into Beancount, a plain text accounting software, a few times a year. My setup uses basic machine learning to classify each transaction. This gives me a decent understanding of my situation when combined with Fava, which visualizes the data.
Each month I save a set amount of money automatically into a few different index funds.
I make sure everything that is a monthly payment is something I actually use. Only one streaming service at a time, cheapest phone service etc.
I keep an eye on my main account every now and then to see how much I have. If i feel like it is stacking up more than what I may need in a short amount of time, I either buy more index funds or put it in an account with interest on it. If the main account ever runs out of money I have done something wrong.
I would say I don’t really budget. For me I do not feel the need. I am by no means rich, but not spending money on wasteful things really does a lot. E.g. make food most of the time instead of eating out, cut your own hair, only buy things that last and do your research before buying anything significant.
Please keep in mind I live in the EU and pay a sort of salary insurance so I do not have to stress a lot if something were to happen to change my situation.
Don’t autopay when possible, keep your credit cards down to one or two and itemize at the end of the month so you can catch things adding up. Things like groceries, budget roughly around the same amount each time, things like eating out, door dash etc that’s where the itemization comes in, do the math or use an app to help add it up. Put money into a savings account whenever you have extra. Do not, I repeat do not look at your bank and go “sweet I have an extra $300 this month, time for a new [whatever]”, put it in the savings
I avoid automatic payments like the plague. I never give insurance companies, utilities, credit companies, etc. permission to withdraw from my account. All it takes is one underpaid office drone to make a mistake, and you’re overcharged a thousand dollars. You can (probably) get the money back, but not without a time consuming hassle.
Ever notice that billing mistakes on paper bills are virtually never in your favor? In my experience, I’ve always been overcharged, and never undercharged. I don’t expect automatic payments to be any different.
I let them mail me paper bills, which I then pay through my bank’s website. When the payment is made, I write the confirmation number on the bill itself. Yes, it’s more cumbersome, but that’s a price I’m willing to pay. There’s a verifiable paper trail, and I’m completely in control. Since it’s my money, I deserve to be.
In my country you can set an upper limit to the automatic payments. (It’s mandatory for the banks to implement.) So I just put in like plus 3-4 dollars as the max they can withdraw above my average bill and I’ll just get a notification if they try to withdraw above that limit (and they would be refused to do so). Fortunately it never happened.
I use a spreadsheet. When I need to budget, I download my transaction history as a CSV and a couple of simple sumif formulas give me all the info I need.
I’m not aware of a good FOSS solution software-wise and frankly I don’t want my entire financial history to be accessible to a data mining firm.
I write all my expenses and incomes down onto app called Wallet by budget bakers. I don’t set any monthly budgets or anything however, because I find that keeping track alone already makes me much more mindful consumer. I already have records of my finances for almost 3 years so it’s pretty interesting to get to monitor my spending across a long timeframe.
I just use my notes app and the letter “x” Two denote whether that thing has been paid already. I use a method called the Dave Ramsey every dollar method where every dollar has a purpose and you budget in such a way that absolutely every single dollar you get has a job. So, I get paid, and then my bank account is nearly empty two days later, but every dollar has done its job. I know that there are unexpected expenses, so a few dollars are miscellaneous, and their job is just to cover the $5 subscription that comes out quarterly, I forgot, etc.
Maybe a bit basic but at the beginning of every month I clone this Google Sheets template, set goals in each category, and manually log receipts as I spend. Then at the end of the month, I “audit” my budget against my credit card transactions, pay off credit, and create the next month’s budget with any adjustments learned from the previous one.
For bigger view, long-term, I just linked all my accounts into Quicken and look at it sometimes.
I created my own, very simple sheet back in the day and it served me well enough.
Reality is, unless you’re running a business, tracking every cent in super granular accounts/columns isn’t really useful. My approach was to simply categorize into running expenses, groceries, cloth, leisure, major expenses (washing machine, phones). That makes tracking very simple, so it doesn’t take long and you actually keep doing it.
I have an Excel workbook with three worksheets. One worksheet calculates my paydays out over the next few years, and using Excel formulas a table of paydays per month is calculated. I get paid every two weeks, so some months are 3 pay checks and the rest are 2. If you get paid a fixed amount per month it's easier.
The next sheet has tables for annual, monthly, and weekly expenses. The annual table has a column for month of the year. If I have a quarterly payment, I add it to the annual table four times, each with the correct month.
The final worksheet is a basic revenue less expenses table, one for each calendar year. It lists my income per month for each month, and then lists my monthly expenses, my annual expenses that hit that month, and weekly expenses calculated to reflect the partial weeks. All using formulas do it is easy to extend out to future years.
The worksheet also calculated how much I have left over, and what my savings target is (80% of unbudgeted funds). It's important for the actual costs of each month to be accurate, because averages hide real world things, like in November I have a large amount of renewals including my annual car insurance payment. I will always spend more than I make in November, and knowing that means I'm not panicking with unexpected expenses.
What I've found is that there is an art to budgeting. For example, I budget $100/month for discretionary purchases, plus $20/week to take my kids out for cocoa. You want to be specific enough in the budget that you have fairly few purchases not directly accounted for, with a little bit of latitude that it doesn't become a grind to track purchases.
Over the course of the month any purchase that exceeds the budgeted amount or that doesn't fit a budget category gets tracked on a separate sheet so I can see if I need to rebudget or if there was just a one time thing. Generally speaking, if it is too much work to track your individual purchases, you might be making too many small or impulse purchases that add up.
I also use Excel for my shopping lists to stay focused when I go to the store, and the mobile app easily lets me strike through items as I get them.
GnuCash. I’m with Starling Bank. I transfer about £550 to my credit card pot to spend for the month and do my very best not to exceed it. I have an Amex (default) and MasterCard credit cards on which all my day-to-day spending occurs. American Express gives me a balance text every Sunday, but entering purchases in GnuCash makes sure I know what it is roughly.
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