Life Hack #3: Budgeting Tools

When it comes to budgeting, I might be up there with the best of em. Don’t get me wrong, life happens, but that shouldn’t stop you from being as prepared as possible. I use a couple iPhone/Android apps in combination with Excel to get my budget in order. I can email the spreadsheet to anyone that is interested

My Excel spreadsheet for 2016: Ps I did not actually have $10k in the bank last year. Came up well short lol. I also am a single guy so I wasn’t feeding a family. Look at this screenshot as an example and not my final numbers. 

BillTracker and Spending App (2 separate apps)

These are my go to apps for budgeting. I love my privacy, so I stayed away from apps seeking access to my accounts for monitoring. They are also very simple to use! I hate downloading an app only to find out that it is too technical. 

BillTracker is simply a calendar/reminder of sorts, where you put in all your bills and their respective due dates. You can set them as recurring or as 1 time. Once I pay off something in full, instead of deleting the reminder, I set it to $0 so in case I reuse the card/creditor, I still get a reminder.

Spending App is also amazing. I use it to track my expenses. All my income/paycheck is input for the month, and then I log every expense to offset the income. It’s pretty useful to me because there is an iPhone widget that lets me log things in very quickly. There is also a carryover feature that lets me take any positive balance from one month over to the next.