Does anybody know abt any free online daily expense tracker?

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LoveULife
Posts: 33
Joined: Fri Sep 22, 2006 5:31 am

Does anybody know abt any free online daily expense tracker?

Post by LoveULife » Tue Jan 30, 2007 9:59 am

Hi All,
I have been facing a constant problem of not able to track my expenses and plan my budget accordingly. Its just that I hate writing expenses in a notebook at home and then calculating the expenses for each week ,months etc. MS Excel does help to some extent but then it has its limitations.
does anybody know abt a free online expense tracker?
Start from where u are, with whatever you have
make something of it ,and never get SATISFIED

LoveULife

pangelsue
Posts: 571
Joined: Sun Mar 12, 2006 2:13 pm
Location: Wisconsin

Post by pangelsue » Tue Jan 30, 2007 3:45 pm

I am actually pretty good at setting up budgets. I have had to do it for years for our family and I now do it for my daughter and some of her friends.
Usually it just involves, listing all the items you regularly spend money on like rent/house payment, utilities, phone bill, cable bill, food, credit cards, car payment,doctor bills, insurance whatever. Multiply those expenses by how many times a year they occur, like rent times 12 months and food and gas times 52 weeks and insurance twice a year etc. Add them all up and subtract the total from your salary. Divide what is left by 52 and that is your weekly spending amount. For my daughter it is $140.00 a week. She found that when she took the whole $140.00 out on Fridays, she was broke by Monday. Now she takes $20.00 a day out and she finds she usually has money left each day because she does less impulse spending. It takes a while to get it right because there are bills you forget but eventually it works quite well. The best part is when you know what your weekly spending money is, you can spend it without worry that it will mean you won't be able to make a payment. She and I both also set up an excel spreadsheet every January listing 52 columns for the 52 weeks of the year. The rows are expenditures/bills. We plug in the amounts due on the weeks they will show up. Once a week or payday, just go to the spreadsheet and see what checks to make out. The money for those expenditures must stay in the checking account. The only money that can be removed is the planned spending money.
A lot of growing up happens between "it fell" and "I dropped it."

LoveULife
Posts: 33
Joined: Fri Sep 22, 2006 5:31 am

Post by LoveULife » Wed Jan 31, 2007 12:28 pm

Thanks a lot pangelsue for taking so much efforts to guide me planning my budget.
I liked your idea of dividing a year into weeks and not into months to get an idea about how much to spend on each week.

Actually I strated earning just a year ago and to my surprise I failed to save a single penny where as my other friends who joined with me in the same job at the same time with sane salary have enough money with them now to even purchase a car. And theworst part is I now do not have personal savings to give to my weould be to start our new life.
When I realised this I felt so shameful.
I am kind of shopping lover. lot of times I just shop coz I am in bad mood or feeling lonely or just coz of temptations. Thanks to NOsDit that now atleast I do not spend much on junk food, but still the problem persists.
Also what about unexpected expenses? say for example unplanned air travels that can not be avoided?
please guide me.
once again thanks for your suggestion.
Start from where u are, with whatever you have
make something of it ,and never get SATISFIED

LoveULife

pangelsue
Posts: 571
Joined: Sun Mar 12, 2006 2:13 pm
Location: Wisconsin

Post by pangelsue » Wed Jan 31, 2007 12:44 pm

Savings is a great thing to add into the plan. You might want to have 2 savings account. One that is untouchable and one that is for unexpected events. Good thinking about catagories I missed. My daughter isn't making enough yet for these catagories. She just saves her tax refund every year for unexpected expenses. You go!!!
A lot of growing up happens between "it fell" and "I dropped it."

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