PearBudget Trial
April 5, 2007
Tchah! On the plus side, I’ve been hunting for a good budgeting tool that wasn’t MSN Money or Quicken because I don’t want to deal with importing information from a million places. PearBudget does that. And PearBudget does all sorts of little calculatory things that I like, like giving me immediate spent/budgeted totals for my categories. It also has this cool analysis page with monthly totals columns.
On the minus side, I’m now obsessively inputting charges from the past few months. I’m having extreme difficulty tearing myself away. And though I’m usually very careful about how and when I spend money, I can already see a pattern of spending way more loosely than I suspected in the past few months. Yes, finding spending patterns is the point of tracking all the expenses and the only way to plug holes, but it’s still sort of a horrific feeling. Thank goodness for credit cards, though. If I’d spent that money in cash or using checks, this would be ten times more frustrating.
What I’d love to see:
(For my neurotic side) An ability to enter every single transaction separately, even on the same day, with a description column so I know exactly where every penny went.
(For my other neurotic side) A section dedicated to savings: regular savings, retirement savings, etc.
To compensate, I may take the savings category out of the Regular Expenses section and create a column under the Variable Expenses section, but that doesn’t feel quite right.
Any suggestions?
