Joshua Herzig-Marx

Update: Welcome PearBudget blog readers. A quick request: if you do use PearBudget (or some other tool) to track you expenses, I’d be curious to hear about your workflow in the comments. Thanks!

In sixteen hours we leave for two weeks in Israel and Italy – a last hurrah before an MBA and a PhD in Social Work. While we’re both getting an extremely generous amount of assistance, money will be tight over the text few years and I’ve been wondering what tools the Internet provides for keeping track of our cash.

A while back, Lifehacker asked about good tools for budgeting. Perhaps not surprisingly, most users suggested Excel or other spreadsheet tools. Spreadsheets have the advantages of flexibility and ad hoc reuse. With the advent of Google Spreadsheets, Zoho Sheet, and other similar online tools the primary disadvantage–locking the user to a single computer–has been obviated.

Other commenters suggested Mvelopes, a full featured cash and financial management application, and Snowmint Budget, a desktop budgeting application. These both are based on the envelope budgeting methodology–fine if that’s what you want to follow but not so flexible for the rest of us.

PearBudget is a neat tool built in Excel that combines budget setting with budget tracking, but requires you to save and transcribe receipts. It looks like they’re working on a web version.

The downsides of these web and computer tools–that you need to be at a computer to use them–may be addressed by Filo, a printable expense register. Perhaps this (or any other paper-based expense tracker) could be combined with Pearbudget to avoid having to carry around receipts.

Some tools aren’t designed to help you track your spending. Instead, they motivate you to save. The Lunch Savings Calculator is one example: by being a cheap bastard with my PB&J I can save over $1000 a year!

If your problem is paying bills on time, perhaps reminder services like billQ would, erm, fit the bill.

The problem with most of these solutions are that they don’t provide the full solution set (building a budget, tracking expenses, and measuring performance), lock you in to a proprietary platform, and require that you physically be at a computer. My requirements would be:

• Ability to set budget categories, amounts, and time frames arbitrarily
• Ability to record expenses as they happen with little or no data reentry
• Ability to generate reports showing actuals vs. budgeted, where the money’s going, etc.
• Live access to budgeting an expense data in a structured format like XML for analysis wherever and however I like

Unfortunately, I have yet to find what I want. Lifehacker has a clever trick that accomplishes some of what I want–they hack up some Perl scripts to interface with AIM to allow users to instant message or SMS their expenses. Ubiquity is provided, and the data is accessible as a local text file, but it’s hardly convenient for the non-techies among us.

Finally, we must not be the only ones stressing about money. Also via Lifehacker is Oprah’s Debt Diet.

The best book I’ve read about managing money is the Five Rituals of Wealth. It teaches that wealth comes from the discipline to know where your money is spent.