Home Budgeting Plans/Apps

for buying a home or like a household budget?

Household budgeting.  Tony already owns the condo that we're living in and until I'm able to work, this is where we're going to be staying for a while. 

Thanks for the suggestions!

Dave - either I'm not seeing where my bank allows me to do all that on its website, or they don't offer that kind of a link?  Especially with the mobile app, there isn't a way to track items.

I really do like the look of Mint.com and going to take more of a look for what's offered.  Thanks Bear! 

I use a simple excel spreadsheet. It's separated into income and expense categories and I can plan/budget an entire year in advance. When you use it (really anything) year over year it's pretty easy to guess what things like utilities and other costs will be in the future, so you can pre-input everything as an educated guess.

I update it daily against my online bank statement.

We use excel for gross budgets, with different employment scenarios and expenses, and then quicken for importing all the credit card/bank transactions to give us those totals. 

Column for core expenses like bare minimum food, rent/mortgage/insurance. Then a column with optional expenses. Then a few columns with various salary combinations (both working, 1 on EI, stay-at-home-mom - whatever might come up. Then it's easy to see how much you should be clearing a month, year, 5 year, etc. Want a new car? Add it in the optional expense and see how all your 1-5-10 year lines would change. 

If Quicken was free I'd probably look into it a bit more, but right now... Free is the price I can afford!  Yay!  Free! 

That's one thing that I'm really trying to do starting this month is to track absolutely everything that is spent to see exactly how much is spent and where/what it's being spent on.    

x2 for Mint

Here's a blank worksheet like this one I use, if it helps you get started (manual, but free!).

The formulas are inputted - all you have to do is enter your wages and expenses. This is set to my pay schedule so you'd have to adjust to yours. 

Totals appear calculated at the bottom of the worksheet.

Thanks for this Lisa! 

I don't have Excel, but I should be able to convert it to OpenOffice. 

blueyedbikergirl - 2013-01-03 12:28 PM So far I'm really liking Mint - thanks very much for the suggestion   

They have a great iPhone/iPad app too

I've been toying with this website and I think they are in the process of developing apps.

http://www.learnvest.com/

I also like the site because they have a number of articles and other tools for different financial needs.