Help with budgeting and being a better adult

[sleepytimebaby]

Hi so I have got myself in a bit of a mess with money. Luckily not with credit cards or loans but I have obliterated savings and never seem to have any money left at the end of the month. I think I need a really good budgeting app where I can put in every penny I spend and see where it goes. Can anyone recommend anything? I can't keep doing this cycle of saving borrowing until there is nothing left to borrow and then expecting help to be dug out of the mess I have made. Any advice will be greatly appreciated and listened to. TIA.

YNAB is brilliant. Have used it for about five years and absolutely love it.

Thanks @FreckledLeopard I will check it out. I have downloaded money saving exegetes budget planner but need something I ca update in the moment as it will help to keep a better track of things I think

Second YNAB - it is a change of philosophy as much as a helpful app, and once you have your head around the rules it is amazing how your attitude changes towards what you want your money to do.

Have a watch of Nick True on YouTube - he has some great videos on set up etc and watching them might give you an idea if it's for you.

Another vote for YNAB. Life changing for us.

You may be initially put off from YNAB because it comes with an annual cost, but I think most of us who have used it for some time have found that it more than pays for itself. It has a mobile app so you can update on the go and see your budget in real time.

Another YNAB vote. I save at least double the annual cost by following.

That and get thee to money saving expert and start listening to Dave Ramsey!

YNAB sounds like an awful lot of work to keep up with, as well as costing money. Could you really be bothered with it?

You mention a cycle of saving and borrowing. What are the things that cause you to use up your savings? You may find a lot of them are expected expenses that you need to plan for, such as replacing white goods, car repairs, etc.

So many people mention that they have no money due to 'an unexpected car bill' but if you have a car (or washing machine, pet etc) you should expect to spend money on it sooner or later, so need to save money for this.

So make sure you put away money on payday for all annual and irregular expenses like Christmas, insurances, car bills, white goods replacement etc. This is more important in your budget than day to day spending.

Also, see if you can download a few months worth of transactions from your bank account or credit card, to see where your money is going except bills. Look at the average weekly/monthly supermarket spend over the past few months, same for petrol or other transport, clothes, leisure spending. Put it all into a spreadsheet and add up all the categories.

Think about where you spend your money, the information will already be there. Eg if you regularly buy coffee or lunch, that's where your money is going.

YNAB sounds like an awful lot of work to keep up with, as well as costing money. Could you really be bothered with it?

Once it's up and running, it really is no time at all to keep up with. You have the app on your phone and quickly enter a transaction, and once a month you plan out your budget. Recurring transactions like mortgage etc just happen in the software. No different in time commitment to any other monthly review of finances, really.

Like anything there is an initial learning curve, but most of that is in the stuff you'd need to do anyway, like you say, figuring out how much you averagely spend on stuff. Where it's really great is as you identify - pointing out 'true expenses' of things we spend on every year/bi-annually etc.

You can DIY a spreadsheet and it will cost less, of course, but I honestly think it's worth the money!

I don't know what YNAB is, I'll have to look into it.
I use ISaveMoney app which is free and works brilliantly for me. You just pop in your monthly income, build your own categories and everytime you spend, pop it in the app. It allows you to budget for each category too so you can give yourself an allowance for things like eating out. I've just started maternity leave and plan to be off a year but will only receive any payments for 9 months and this will all vary significantly so what I have done is calculated what I can afford each month over the 12 months and this is the money I put into the app so I can see clearly what budget I need to stick to even though in these early days, there's a lot more available in my account. Rather than looking at my bank account to see if I can afford something, I look at the app and whatever it is, I go to that category and see. It's really helpful I find and it's free.

I second including known expenses in your budget. My joint account with my husband has all our household direct debits but we also added up the annual cost of things like home insurance, Amazon Prime, pet insurance etc. And divided all those expenses by 12 so the monthly amount we put in collectively covers those as well when it comes time to pay for them. I then do exactly the same with my personal account which covers my car, my phone, my professional registration etc. And again, I budget in money for car service, MOT and repairs. My direct debits are actually only £30 or so our of that but I put in £140 a month to cover all those things so it's not a shock when it comes time to pay. This is especially helpful as my car is always due it's service, MOT and insurance renewal right before Christmas. Equally, you tend to get a better deal on certain things like insurance if you can pay the annual lump sum rather than needing to spread the cost so it does save money to do it this way.

I use YNAB as well, and really like it.

It is a method/philosophy first and a software second, so you need to be behind the method. You can do the method without the software if you're disciplined (personally I tried this and struggled massively). The Reddit forum for it is great for support.

It is hands-on, but that's what makes it so good as you keep checking in with it rather than just sitting in the background letting it track things. And yes there are shortcuts such as setting up recurring transactions for things which get paid on direct debit and so on. But it's somehow set up in such a nice way it feels almost like gamification. I'm three months in and I want to check it regularly, it doesn't feel like a chore, it feels fun and it's incredibly motivating to see our stats going up and savings pots filling up etc.

Making "unexpected expenses" expected has been a game changer. I tried to do this before, but without an easy way to sort those savings "pots" and keep them separate from other spending I didn't get very far (there are other, cheaper/free ways to do this other than YNAB, if that's your selling point - I think monzo and chip, for example.) I also like the zero-sum budgeting and the way you do it when you get money, rather than forecasting all the money you're likely to get in a month and allocating that, which always seems to end up with me in overdraft because I'm spending the money before I've received it.