I have tried Mint, Personal Capital, GNUCash, and probably a few others, and I seem to have settled on Tiller. Basically, I like the convenience of automatically pulling in transactions and balances, but I like retaining control of the budgeting process.
I know there are a ton of others out there, so let’s post our favorites and a short explanation of what makes them great.
I feel like I’ve tried just about everything - YNAB is still the best.
It’s frustrating to have to pay for a third-party service to pull in European bank transactions, though. YNAB is expensive enough on its own.
I love YNAB. I did not love the price hike they instituted here in the last couple of years.
Still worth it in my book though.
I’ve been using YNAB since 2013 and I really enjoy the method, it fits with my lifestyle.
However, I went back to using the old YNAB4 when they announced the big price hike. I manually import the transaction files from my bank. It’s easy and doesn’t take a lot of time. I couldn’t justify the new price, especially when taking exchange rates into account.
I’ve been using YNAB (You Need A Budget) and simply love it. I like that it’s zero based budgeting, imports transactions with my banks, and allows me to track every dollar coming in and assign it to its proper category. While not the most helpful, I also like the net worth tracker and reports while on desktop.
I’m going to put in a third vote for YNAB.
Tracking is just looking backwards on what you DID spend your money on, my friend.
Look forward and start planning what you WANT to spend it on. Budgeting is so different from tracking.
I am personally a huge fan of YNAB (You Need A Budget) and I just found there’s a (sub-lemmy?) for YNAB as well, here: https://lemmy.world/c/ynab
I wrote my own! https://budgetmyway.com
- Really wanted weekly “reserve” based budgeting. If I am under budget one week, that amount will get added to the reserve. And if I am over budget another week, that will take money away from the reserve. I also have the concept of “reserve expenses”, not regular weekly expenses but usually bigger/unplanned that pull directly from the reserve.
- Privacy: no ads, tracking, etc
- No actual banking connections/APIs. Manually enter expenses.
- A project I can improve over time. Been using it for over 10 years now.
I just use Excel, but I also don’t track my spending at a very detailed level. I have a budget for the month, and I sort of adjust my spending as I go to make sure I meet that budget.
Monarch Money can get very granular and you can make your own rules as to what box a line item goes into. https://www.monarchmoney.com/
Been using Simplifi (by Quiken) for a few months now and it’s not bad. Their web app is really good, and they just completely rewrote their mobile apps which work much better now.
I use YNAB throughout the month. At the end of the month I summarize my income and expenses in a spreadsheet so I can see how my spending trends over time.
I have had a subscription to YNAB (you need a budget) for years now. It’s simple and straight to the point for exactly what we need. It pulls everything from my bank accounts smoothly. My partner understands it and is able to easily use it, which is extremely important.
I tried Mint and have suggested it in the past as a free alternative to folks who need help budgeting, but it tends to be too complicated for most that I’ve suggested it to. And that’s even after setting it up for them and showing them basic usage.
I used the GNUCash for a while. As a manual option, it was good for when I was importing everything to Quicken.
I no longer use quicken or manually import anything.
There’s not a lot of products that I’ll recommend, but I can say that YNAB is worth every cent.
Big fun of Toshl https://toshl.com
I use Money Manager EX. The GUI may not look appealing and looks like it’s been made in the 90s. However, all data is completely local, it is closer to real double entry accounting than Mint and the likes, and the data is stored as SQLite, which is very useful for running scripts to get custom reports.
