Please recommend an app to help me budget

[SmallBee]

I am about three months away from maternity leave and I need to sort my finances out a bit.

I've never learnt how to budget properly, I manage to pay my bills but I never seem to be able to make savings.
I've decided that the best thing to help me sort myself out is to literally record every single thing I spend my money on so I can look and see what on earth I'm doing with it. I'm also hoping it'll make me think twice about buying things in the first place!

Please can anyone recommend a good budgeting app for an android phone that will help me? TIA.

YNAB helped me greatly (You Need A Budget). You can have a month free and then buy it if you find it's worth it. There's a thread on it in "Money Matters", I'll have a search.

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/credit_crunch/2322049-cant-afford-ynab-what-do-you-use

and there are other threads but this gives an idea of other apps too.

I found YNAB very worth it - you assign all income to "envelopes" and if you're tempted to overspend in a category like clothes, you can but you have to take it out of somewhere else. So you're thinking "DO I want this £30 top more than I want the £30 I've put in a fund for meeting friends for lunch etc. It changes your whole mentality so you land up spending your money on your own actual priorities (instead of my older mentality which was more like "Well I have £30 available so..").

I had tried just tracking spending but that didn't change things as such.

It's said to save you 200 dollars in the first month - I didn't think that would happen as I had v little coming in. But it saved me more than that.

Best of luck with it.

Oh that's brilliant, thank you so much for your help

You're welcome, hope it works well for you!

I used YNAB for a while as we got it free as DH was a student. I liked it a lot but found it overcomplicated.
I'm using AceBudget3 now which is based on the same "envelope" idea but a lot more simplified.

Another vote for YNAB. Gone from the bottom of my £1000 overdraft to saving 40% of my income and no overdraft in the last 5 months :)

I use Toshl Finance on my phone, it's a simple app & really excellent. You can track all your expenses there, put them in categories, set budgets & see where you are with income & expenses. You can do this per month or overall. Really recommend it.