CashBook doesnt come with many frills, but since its free you cant.Top London wedding planner, Andri of Always Andri Wedding Design (and our resident wedding planning expert) has kindly offered top tips on wedding budgets where she takes you through the process of creating your own personal wedding budget step by step. As a personal finance application one can enter receipts, assign each transaction to a category and to an account.By this point you’re probably sick of hearing me harp about the importance of tracking your spending.The Mac App Store has hundreds of home finance applications (mainly found in the. My Budget is an easy solution to balance your accounts, track your expenditure, and manage your money and more. My Budget Free is the free version of the highly successful and top ranked My Budget app.And to understand it, you have to track it. Period.Why? Because to improve something you have to understand it. And that’s not quite the case.Put simply, tracking your spending is THE easiest way I know to gain control of your finances. With the frequency and ferocity that I talk about tracking your spending, you’d expect recording your expenses for a month to be the personal financial equivalent of winning the Powerball. And there’s even that time I linked to someone else talking about it in a recent monthly Link-O-Rama.Free customizable iWork budget templates for Mac Numbers and Pages including weekly, bi-weekly, monthly and yearly personal budget templates and planners.Safe to say, the horse is sufficiently dead.So of course, I’m going to talk about it again.I know, I know. I bring it up whenever I’m interviewed by the media.But for good measure, I prefer to manually record my expenses in a spreadsheet too.This may seem redundant, but I’ve found there’s a certain magic to putting pen to paper, or in my case, keypad to excel spreadsheet. Unfortunately, Most People Don’t Track Their SpendingAs amazing as all those benefits are, most methods of tracking your spending are a huge pain in the ass.Meaning chances are, you’re not doing it.How do I know? Because I run an entire blog that hinges on my spending patterns, and even I couldn’t muster up the willpower to consistently track my spending every month.Sure, I review my spending once a month through Personal Capital. Progress becomes unavoidable. And when every detail of your spending is highlighted, it becomes laughably easy to spot the areas of improvement.How to Track Your Spending with Apple’s Numbers AppI first came across this awesome strategy thanks to DirtCheapWealth.com. Even this proved easy to forget, and it turns out the electronic equivalent of napkin paper notes isn’t the most organized tracking system.I thought I was S.O.L., right until I stumbled onto the iPhone’s Numbers app, and I’m now convinced it’s the single best system to easily track your spending patterns. I appreciated the result, but I started to dread the chore.I attempted to ease the process by keeping running a note in my phone.
Budget Planner Full Size ImageIn OtherAt some point, I must have shuffled Numbers into my “Extras” folder, which is the abbreviation I use for my Folder of Annoying Default Apps that Apple Somehow Keeps Installing on My Phone. Numbers makes gaining control over where your money is going as easy as sending a text message.As it turns out, the app has been sitting in my phone next to Garage Band and iTunes U (whatever that is) for years. Click for the clear and pretty full size imageIn other words, forget the spreadsheets, credit card statements, and napkin notes. At the end of the month, you’ll have a super snazzy report to help you spot any patterns. Download adobe cs6 for mac free mac eduOnce the template is set, it’s not an exaggeration to say that tracking that tracking every single expense takes no more than a few seconds a day. Spend 10 minutes setting up a template using my instructions below. You don’t even have to download anything.Setting up the spreadsheet to automatically categorize my spending caused me a little headache at the start, so I thought it’d be beneficial to publish a quick tutorial.Don’t be like me and spend a few hours googling for instructions that don’t exist. Score one for convenience! It’s in your pocket all day long. And it just so happens to be the easiest spending tracker ever, because: If you’d like a free copy of the exact budget template I made, sign up for the Money Wizard email list using the form below, and I’ll send it over. If you’re not a fan of 1970s yellow and brown, you can change any chart’s color scheme by clicking it and pressing the paint brush button. Why? Push notifications flying across your phone’s home screen will remind you to update your spreadsheet, and will make remembering the cost as easy as copy and paste. Turn on your credit card’s mobile alerts. Put simply, I’ve been completely blown away by this app, and I hope you are too! Random Tips: ConclusionI can say with 100% honesty that tracking my spending may be the single most important habit that set me on my course of big saving.And Numbers is far and away the most convenient method I’ve found to do so. Total control.One bad thing is I have to input things manually. You can improve your sheet if you happen to see something cool in other finance appOne example is I somewhat imitate LevelMoney’s spendable money that shows higher overview since it is easier than “I am half way of the month, I use only 35% of shopping, but I am over 80% of eating out, am I doing okay or what?”No need to get freaked out when Mints just counts every transaction twice, messing your budget. You can add more charts to your liking. It works just as well.One nice thing about our own budget sheet that I find is:I don’t have to input the transactions that I know would get refunded later.Unnecessary credit card payment transactions / or transfer transactions.2. Since I am dirt poor, I use Google Sheet from my Android phone. If you are doing this for the first time you many want to add data from previous months so that your annual budget can be accurately determined.Does Numbers automatically know when a new month begins ? Do you need to save a record every month or does Numbers allow you to review/select a specific time frame/month and how do you do that ?Formatting the pie charts and graphs would be nice to include. Also you do not give an example of entering data so that users following your instructions are sure they are doing it correctly and know what to expect.
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