I used to talk about fandom in this livejournal

[miss_pryss]

Weird, right? Maybe I will again, some day. (Leverage! Bones! Supernatural - still! I really am watching television, you guys, and reading fic about it! I swear!)

IN THE MEANTIME, it's nice to have a community of smart ladies to ask practical questions of! Hey ladies, here's one:

Do you use/know of a financial tracking tool where you record all your expenditures and it helps you manage your budget and also examine the way you're spending money? Because I could really use both of those things! I went through my finances recently and it turns out I've been spending HEAPS more money than I thought I was! What an unpleasant surprise.

So basically I'm turning over a new leaf, and recording everything I spend in a little moleskine notebook is only charming for so long.

Comments

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

Quicken? When I was in high school/college, my parents required me to use Quicken and then go over budgets with them. It does little graphs and things and you can feed your bank and credit card info straight into it from their websites. I always found it a little fiddly, though, and if you have the automated input on, you end up with lots of largely unidentifiable entries in bank short hand. I haven't used it in a while, though, so I don't know how the latest version is.

[prillalar]

I hear good things about http://www.mint.com/ though I've never tried it myself.

[lynnmonster.livejournal.com]

We just use a spreadsheet on Google Docs: we make a new tab every two months, start the top line with the current bank balance, and then just indicate deposits/withdrawals with a formula to display the new total next to it.

We tried doing some fancier stuff, but it didn't take. This way, we have a column for the date, one for the +/- amount, one for the new total, and one for a description of the transaction.

[trishalynn.livejournal.com]

Word. I use a Google Docs spreadsheet to keep my checkbook balanced, too, but I don't track my types of expenses (yet). That will probably be phase two of my financial planning makeover, which I'll start once I've managed to get a two to four month rent buffer in my savings account.