There are lots of apps and tips out there on how to manage your company finances. But I rarely come across apps and tips for personal finances. For years now I have been using Excel, Personal Budget template. Every month I open it up and fill out my income, my fixed expenses like food, telephone, rent, etc. And as the month goes along I update it with my variable expenses made.
But this isn’t working anymore, mostly because I pay with “plastic” 98% of the time. And
Excel can’t handle multiple expenses. Also Excel winds up all amounts, e.g. 5.65 will become
6.00 It isn’t that bad because you usually have an extra 10 because of this by the months end. But
right now money is tight and every euro counts.
So today I came up with a method that’s worth trying out. I found out about Burn a while back. This is a very basic beta app that lets you keep track of expenses you make daily. While it did add up all expenses nicely to the last cent it still misses something: a spending limit. For e.g my food budget each month is 200 euro. So it would be handy if I could open a file for the current month, fill out the spending limit and just keep track of all money spend on food and have a clear view of how much you spend and what is left.
So I decided to name each Burn report like this: month-category-limit(may-food-100). This way I can remember the limit for the given category each month and keep track of my spending. So starting June I’ll keep a file on food, credit card, and the rest and see if this method will keep me from running out of money before the month ends.
I will still use Excel to keep track of total income and fixed expenses. And I’ll use Burn for the variable expenses. Meanwhile I hope they keep developing Burn and add more features. I don’t need one app per-see to manage all my finances unless someone can make one very simple and functional without too much fuss.
