What do you use to track monthly fixed expense?

Life Hacking
1

what do you use to track monthly fixed expense?

I have briefly checked YNAB and am not yet convinced. Its concept of setting a target of the fixed expense and assign account balance to the target is not what I need. I don’t need to consider my fixed expense as a target, I can easily pay them off. I just want to record the actual expense. Even though they don’t change much, they do vary from time to time. Some months the sunrise bill, the electricity bill is slightly higher than the other months.

Also YNAB is not free. I wonder if any of you have a similar problem? What do you use? I can imagine some simple excel sheet will do. Or a simple free tool app, simpler than YNAB. I’d love to hear your choices. Thanks

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I’m using hledger (https://hledger.org/) to track all my assets, liabilities, equity, income and expenses.

After you’ve recorded your transactions (I actually automate this using hledger-flow) you can instruct hledger to generate an income statement for a given period which shows your income and expenses. You can also ask it to generate a column with an average per income and expense account for the given period such that it’s easier to compare them.

Note however these are Plain Text Accounting tools so you need to be a bit comfortable handling a text editor and a command line.

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Toshl (not just fixed, but all)

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Or do you mean future expenses that you are putting money aside for? I use the same Excel sheet if I ever need it.

A thread similar to this one but I decided not to merge them.

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5

KMyMoney is perfect for my needs. It’s free, easy to set up and run if you’re a bit familiar with double accounting. I’ve been using it for over 10 years now.
It’s not a shiny app but a good old desktop program where you keep full control over your data.

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Homebudget - one-off payment of CHF 5 and works like a charm

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Excel. You can track whatever you want :slight_smile:

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10

I use firefly to track my fixed and non-fixed (all) expenses:

i’m not sure if it’s simple enough though…

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I transfer my monthly spendings to revolut where i have a budget and overview of the categories. Simple enough.

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Personally, I use https://budgetbakers.com/ to keep track of my assets. There is a free version and a premium version which costs once CHF 40 without subscription (there are regular offers, I think I had the premium lifetime for only CHF 20). It’s a great tool for mobile and computer use, with the possibility to set up recurring payments or recurring cash inflows.

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I am using YNAB since 2020 but will probably switch to MoneyWiz mid-June when my subscription ends.

I tried Toshl but I wasn’t convinced. Same for HomeBudget, pretty simple and straight forward but I don’t like paying 5.- for an app with 1 update every 8-14 months…

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For only fixed costs, I use an app called subscriptions on my phone. For all expenses, I also use the more advanced Firefly III.

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Anyone using zero based budgeting?
Or seeing any benefit in doing it for mustachians?

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I do not see the benefit on doing for family/personal. But I do not really budget anyway. we only have 2 budgets (personal expenses like an allowance 1000 per month no questions asked whether you save it expend, money for trips goes from this bucket except the transport and accommodation), then I tracked our expenses by categories.

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Is there any free Networth Tracker + Expense recorder that you recommend?

I have been using Toshl for the past 3 years but stopped in the past 4 months because I stopped seeing the value with it…
Especially considering that it doesn’t track networth

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https://beancount.github.io/

the entry bar is abit high (especially if you are not familiar with python/ programming) but it offer absolute automation and freedom to do whatever comes to your mind. fully integrates with python, and thus with anything that has an API or a (csv) export funciton

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just had a look at subscriptions it seems exactly what I would like to have. Just that it doesn’t allow to fluctuate a bit of the fixed cost, for example, sunrise bill is 1 chf higher than the usual. But I guess if I want simplicity, this is as simple as I can get. So cannot complain. thank you

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Just took a look at MoneyWiz and it seems to be able to link to several banks ? I checked into the partner website and it lists ubs, wise, revolut, post finance

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I confirm Revolut is working smoothly.
I’m also using it with PostFinance but 2FA is required for downloading transactions → it takes 1-2 mins.
CreditSuisse is not supported.

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I’m using YNAB since May 2020 and I’m very happy since then. It was a bit frustrating to use it at first, but now it runs smoothly. Also, what I really enjoy is the fact to allow money at the start of the month in order to know exactly fixed expenses you need to allocate and what remains on your pocket for non-reccurent exepenses. The fact to know that after you allocate all your fixed expenses (and investment) you have a bit more is a peace of mind.

However, I will take a look at MoneyWiz, it looks promising.

EDIT: Oh… It is not compatible with Microsoft… Nevermind so…