In one of my previous posts (which can be accessed here) we talked about the importance of creating a budgeting plan to aid in some sensible financial planning so you don’t spend all of your student loan in a crazy few weeks (which is easily done).
There are free budgeting software out there on the market to help you actually set-up and track your budget, also they allow you to make some changes and carry out some analysis on your spending habbits. Downloading and installing a free budgeting software is a great idea to simplify the budget creation process, so below I have highlighted some of the most popular free budgeting software out there on the world wide web at the moment.
ClearCheckBook - A great tool which offers many fantastic features such as comparing your actual spends to your budget, it’s all done and stored online so it’s accessible anywhere, even via your mobile phone. I would say it’s one of the best free free budgeting software out there at the moment so please do check it out.
Free Budget Planner - If you have excel or open office, Martin Lewis at the fantastic MoneySavingExpert.com is offering free templates for a budgeting plan, simply download and open with your favorite spreadsheet software, it’s pretty comprehensive and include most important aspects, you can always add anything which isn’t there, there is also an online version available if you don’t have spreadsheet software.
DIY Spreadsheet - If you can create simple spreadsheets, then you should consider creating your own budget on Excel or OpenOffice. You can tailor the whole thing to suit your needs and include what you want. Sit down at the end of every day or week and input all of the data so you keep ontop of everything.
Those are my favorite methods for keeping a budget electronically, there is always the chart on a piece of paper method but it’s not so easy to keep up-to-date. We would love to hear from you if you have anything to add here.
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November 12th, 2008 at 11:12 am
I use Expensr (http://www.expensr.com) to track my spending - it’s pretty easy to use, and allows you to categorise every item so you can easily see where your money is going each month.
Nothing that can’t be done on paper or a basic spreadsheet, but it also has pretty graphs which can make a pretty mundane task slightly more interesting.
You mention OpenOffice - it’s probably worth a link to the site http://www.openoffice.org as it’s a great piece of free, open source software and a viable alternative to Microsoft Office.
November 28th, 2008 at 9:48 am
Another great piece of freeware is http://www.gnucash.org/ - and open source personal financial management package. If you prefer, you can get a version that runs off a USB memory stick at http://portableapps.com/
Also, check out portableapps for loads of great open source software made portable. Even Firefox, Thunderbird and OpenOffice.
January 26th, 2009 at 10:20 pm
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