Website recommendation: Budgeting/Finances

[yvi]

There are two blogs I read that have a lot to do with finances and budgeting. While they are very US-centric for obvious reasons and I sometimes have to scroll past some of the personal opinions of the people behind them, I still find them very useful to read, so I thought I'd recommend them:

Get Rich Slowly

The Simple Dollar

Comments

[kareila]

Thanks, I'm adding both of these to my feed reader.

The one single biggest thing I do that helps me control my spending is to faithfully use a finance tracking application (I use Moneydance) to see how much I'm spending each month in which areas, and define a budget based on that information and my available funds.

[ladysunflow]

I always wondered, how does that work exactly? Say I spend $200 in Tesco on a myriad of different products. My bank statement will only show: date/shop name/address/amount spend. I don't see how that would be helpful or how it would work with software like Moneydance, so, is it different in other countries?

[kareila]

When I enter a transaction like that in Moneydance, I use the "split" function to put in which portion of the bill was spent in which categories. That way it's still entered as a single expenditure, but it's not all lumped together.

It does involve making a study of the receipts, instead of just blindly downloading the transactions from your bank, but if you want an accurate record, that's the easiest solution I've found.

[maewyn]

Two more recommendations:

Bad Money Advice: Sometimes he gets a little arcane about finance, but I like his takedowns of silly frugality advice and the way he describes, in detail, exactly why some money advice is bad and what would make more sense.

Gail Vaz-Oxlade: Simple, sensible financial advice. Love her. (I am not Canadian so I skip over the posts telling how to maximize Canadian saving plans, fr'instance.)