One of the most important things when it comes to personal finance is taking control of your money, instead of allowing it to control you. You need to track your monthly income and expenses, and give every dollar a name and a job. All income should be assigned to an expense category, or to a saving category. Every penny. If you allow your excess income to remain unassigned, it will disappear, I guarantee it. (I know from personal experience.)
Budgeting Programs To Help Track Your Money
Tracking your family budget is becoming easier all the time as new software options appear on the market every day. Here’s a giant list of some of the best budgeting options available. Some programs are free, some have free trials, and some do cost money. Both Mac and Windows programs are included.
Desktop And Online Applications
- Ace Money Lite: A freeware personal finance manager.
- Adaptu: personal finance management.
- Buddi: A personal finance and budgeting program.
- Budget5000: Plan your personal budget, track spending
- Budget Express: Create and manage a budget.
- Budget Simple: A free, easy to use online budget
- Budgeting Spending Plan: A budgeting guideline that shows amounts you should spend in certain categories.
- BudgetPulse: Organize your cash flow, expenses and bank accounts in one place.
- Budget Tracker: A feature rich money management tool.
- Buxfer.com: Easy online money management.
- Cashbox for Mac OS: Track your personal accounts and analyze and categorize your spending habits.
- ClearCheckbook: Money management software.
- Common Cents: Envelope budgeting software.
- Dave Ramsey’s Personal Finance Software: Straight from the folks at DaveRamsey.com
- Financial Envelope Software: An envelope based budgeting software.
- Fortora Fresh Finance: People friendly finance management.
- Geezeo.com: A set of free online financial tools to help you reach your goals.
- GnuCash: A personal and small-business financial-accounting software.
- Home Budget: Home envelope budgeting software.
- iBank for Mac: A slick looking financial manager with a ton of features.
- iCash: A personal finance manager for Mac and Windows.
- JGnash Personal Finance: A free personal finance manager with many of the same features as commercially-available software.
- JustBudget: A free online web application to manage your personal budget.
- Liquid Ledger: Mac OS personal finance manager.
- Microsoft Money: This is the main software that we use at our house, although it is no longer being supported. If you’re just getting started, you may want to choose something else.
- Mint.com: Easy to use and full featured online money manager that allows you to check all your accounts in one place. Includes budgeting and saving tools.
- MiShell Budget Calendar: Take control of your finances with this easy to use, intuitive software that shows all transactions in an easy-to-understand calendar format.
- Moneydance Personal Finance Manager: Organize your finances, manage your budget, track your portfolio, or just automatically balance your checkbook. Moneydance can do it all.
- Moneystrands: Free money manager that automatically pulls together data from your bank, credit card and investment accounts to provide an accurate, up-to-date picture of your financial life.
- Moneytrackin’: free online webapp that allows you to track all your expenses and income easily.
- MoneyWell: Mac OS envelope budgeting.
- Mvelopes: An online personal finance and spending management system based on the envelope system.
- MySpendingPlan: Free online budgeting software and planning tools.
- NeoBudget: An online budget system that uses the envelope method to help you track your spending habits and stick to a budget.
- Out Of The Dark: Online personal budget.
- Pageonce: Track your money and pay your bills.
- Pear Budget: A simple budgeting and expense tracking service.
- Piggy Budget: Track your spending without complicated accounting.
- PLCash: PLCash is a platform-independent personal financial program.
- Pocketsmith.com: The unique forward-focus of PocketSmith tells you what sticking to budget means for the future of your money. It is a crystal ball for your bank accounts. Very cool!
- Quicken: Great desktop application that does it all.
- Quicken Online: Free, full featured and easy money management – online. Also works and syncs with the Quicken Iphone App. (Update: now merged with Mint.com)
- Rich Or Poor: Track income, expenses, assets, liabilities, and much more
- Simple Home Money Management: Budgeting software.
- Squirrel for Mac: A personal finance application for Mac OS X.
- Snowmint Creative Budget: Manage your money to get out and stay out of debt.
- Yodlee MoneyCenter: Free online money manager to track spending, pay bills and more.
- You Need A Budget : One of the more popular personal finance programs in the personal finance blogosphere, YNAB is highly recommended. Read my full YNAB 3 Review and YNAB 4 Review here. (We use YNAB for our budget now.)
Excel Budget Templates
- Budget Spread: Spreadsheet from gatherlittlebylittle.com
- Budget Spreadsheet: Spreadsheet from MrsMicah.com
- Dave Ramsey Allocated Spending Spreadsheet: Spreadsheet from angus65.com
- Enemy of Debt Budget: Spreadsheet from EnemyOfDebt.com
- Financial Snapshot & Budget: Spreadsheet from BudgetsAreSexy.com
- Google Docs Budget Templates: A bunch of usable budget templates.
- Punch Debt In The Face Budget: Spreadsheet from PunchDebtInTheFace.com
- Vertex42 Budgets And Calculators: Budgets and a variety of other excel calculators.
- Windows Excel Templates: A variety of excel budget spreadsheets are available here.
- Zero Based Budget: Spreadsheet from ratestate.com
Iphone And Ipod Touch Apps
- Bank Of America App: If you have accounts with BoA like I do, this may come in handy. Includes bank and ATM locator that uses Iphone’s GPS.
- Bill Minder: Track recurring bills, mark bills as being paid or unpaid, and manage payment info.
- Bloomberg Mobile: Mobile version of Bloomberg’s financial news, stock info, etc.
- Chase Finance: If you have an account with Chase, this is their online banking app.
- Daily Finance: Money news, stock quotes, stock market news, etc.
- Day Bank: App that allows you to track daily spending.
- iBank Mobile: iPhone app that lets you keep track of your day-to-day spending and account balances on the go.
- iBearMoney: An intuitive personal finance manager.
- Mint.com Iphone App: Great app for always knowing where you are with your finances – gives you a complete picture of all your accounts.
- Moneystrands Mobile: Mobile version of the online application above.
- My Money: Multi-account financial tracker.
- Pay Off Debt: This app is dedicated to helping you run your debt snowball.
- Pennies App: An expense tracker that helps you track your spending against budget goals.
- PocketMoney: a full featured budgeting and account tracking tool.
- QuickBank: A simple multi-account financial management application featuring a tabbed interface.
- Quicken Online Mobile: Syncs with the Quicken online financial tools mentioned above.
- Save Benjis: App that helps you compare prices and find the best deal on what you’re shopping for.
- Spend: Simple application that allows you to track your budget. Also includes a free version.
- Splash Money: Full checkbook and finance tracking tool.
- Squirrel for Iphone: Mobile version of the MacOS personal finance application above.
So there you go. There is no shortage of options when it comes to personal finance tracking and budget software. There really is no excuse for not doing a budget. So why not get started today?
Do you have a favorite personal finance software – either online, desktop or mobile? If you do, let us know about it (and leave a link) in the comments. We’ll add it to the list!
*some links may include affiliate links.
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Last Edited: 23rd May 2013
{ 24 comments… read them below or add one }
Terrific list! I can’t wait to work through it later on today—what do you use for your main budgeting software? We use a combination of Quicken 2007 for Mac + spreadsheets. (We’d use Mint, but our main checking/savings is not supported.)
Andrew´s last post ..Our pain is your gain
I currently use a combination of Microsoft Money, Mint.com and the first spreadsheet in the excel list. It works well for me now, but after writing this post I may give some of these other software a test run.
Fantastic collection, sharing this with my readers and network. Thanks!
Barbara Ling, Virtual Coach ´s last post ..Superb Customer Service – A Lesson From Sears Repair Customer Care
Awesome list. I recently started using AceMoney and it’s pretty cool for what I need it to do.
Single Guy Money´s last post ..10 Tips For Controlling Your Credit Debt
Thank you for including BudgetPulse.com in your long list of excellent resources. These tools will surely hep consumers out and getting started is the key. We just released our brand new site today and released a new savings goals function that will impress. If anyone has any questions please feel free to contact me.
Craig Kessler
Marketing Director at BudgetPulse
craig@budgetpulse.com
BudgetPulse.com is an excellent choice. It is very easy to use and attractive.
Are you trying to seduce me, sir?
haha.. what do you think? :)
Wow! Nice job compiling the list man! I hear a lot of good stuff about Mint – may have to give ‘em a try.
Jason @ RedeemingRiches´s last post ..7 Tips to Achieve Retirement Success
I love this! Thanks for taking the time to put this list together!!
Michelle Traudt´s last post ..Are You Ready For The Holidays?
My pleasure. It only took a week or two. ;)
Now that is a list! There are tons of great resources here, I was going to do a full budget software roundup but frankly it became too daunting. Love those vertex42 spreadsheets myself and I’m a YNAB lover.
Paul @ Fiscalgeek´s last post ..The Career Diaries: The Network Engineer
Thanks for putting this terrific list together, Peter! I’ve been doing my budget/expense tracking old school style (paper and pencil) and have been wanting to upgrade! Thanks for sharing some great resources – Now I can save time AND money!
Christina @ Northern Cheapskate´s last post ..October Budget Review: Budget Fail
Thanks for the list. The problem I had was in finding a good UK based company similar to mint.com
Recently there has been a lot of press coverage and It now looks like there is one to be launched shortly called Money Dashboard.
I have signed up at http://www.moneydashboard.com for the Beta and hope to get started soon.
Hey Peter thanks a lot for adding my budget to such a great list of resources! I agree with Jason, I may have to give Mint a try too.
Brad´s last post ..The Day I Killed My Credit Card
Awesome list….i guess anyone who needs to track his/her Personal Finance this list would be more than enuf for deciding about it…still I would like to recommend Perfios (http://www.perfios.com) as which is a start up from bangalore, India. They seem to have a better way to show themselves as most comprehensive and better auto update of accounts…they cover all kinds of investments and Insurance and Liabilities…try it out !!
Nice list.
Here are a few more to add to the list. I cannot vouch for their quality just thought I would list them.
AceMoney (not the lite version)
IntelliPenny
CommonCents
Moneydance
Money Folders
Visual Money
Budget Planner (from simpleplanning.com) Excel Sheets
EDIT: A Couple More…
Budget Magic
MoneySlinger (Radically different approach to money management)
Very nice list!
I would add “MyFinanceX” for anyone who is a fan of the money jar system like myself.
I like heaps! for my budgets. Plus its all free and updates to all of my online accounts. :)
http://www.heaps.co.nz
Excel is a very nice way of managing your budget. Check out the program I made using Excel, there is a free version on my website http://www.excelmybudget.com no strings attached. It is very easy to use. All you have to do is download your bank and/or credit card statements, copy and paste into the spreadsheet, and the program does the rest! No manually typing in dollar amounts. Let me know what you think!
Thomas
My favorite budgeting software is 3D Budget. 3D Budget has the unique ability to tell you what expenses have been left out of the budget. (http://www.3dbudget.com)
Don’t forget about budgetmath.com! It’s great website that automatically creates your budget very fast and easily: http://www.budgetmath.com
It’s for personal use but you can also use it for a family or a household.
I start keeping a personal budget to track all the things I am buying. This way you can see when you are spending more than you can afford. Initially I was using a spreadsheet but later I found a free online application: http://www.planthebudget.com