The Best Tools for Managing Household Finances

Creating a budget — and sticking to it — is an important first step toward reaching financial goals large and small. Unfortunately, it’s easy to get overwhelmed by the complexity of creating and keeping a detailed budget; not to mention the time and dedication required. Before you’ve finished calculating your income, resolve has faded and your budget remains a good idea you never realized.

Realistically, managing household finances can be challenging, especially when it requires coordinating multiple people’s spending habits and staying on track to meet shared goals. The good news is that a budget doesn’t have to be complicated, and there are plenty of free tools and resources to help you get started and keep going. A handful of new tools have hit the market in recent years that give consumers more options and help individuals and families coordinate their spending and saving with each other. The revolution in personal financial management tools gives people better information and pairs it with a product around their needs, in addition to helping users to build and better manage spending habits. The goal of these tools is to make managing finances easier and more automatic, so you can spend your time on more enjoyable activities.

[RELATED: 4 Easy Apps To Manage and Track Your Money]

Here are several tools that can help you stay on top of your household finances:

Mint
Mint may be the most well-known of the Internet-and smartphone-based budgeting applications. Once you’ve entered basic information, such as banking, credit and investment accounts, Mint begins automatically tracking your money. The default categories are sufficient for most people, and you can add your own. The built-in goal-setting tools are robust and easy to use and, since it’s owned by Intuit, your data feeds right into TurboTax at tax time.

HomeBudget app
This tool allows users to log in at any time and check out their latest spending updates. On HomeBudget, you can manually enter your spending right after a purchase, and that transaction is then shared with the other person. To keep gifts a surprise, users are advised to refrain from logging into their accounts for a couple of weeks around the holidays. There is a cost of $5 to download the app to your phones.

Shared spreadsheets
To track net worth, including savings, 529 account balances and retirement investments, you can use and update a spreadsheet on Google Drive, which is free if you already have Microsoft Excel

installed on your computer. Microsoft provides several simple budget templates, and if you’re familiar with Excel, they’re easy to use. For a truly free alternative, try a budget template for Google Sheets. This option is for those who don’t mind wrangling spreadsheets and entering data manually. Maintaining a spreadsheet budget does require more time than some of the other options here, but many experts believe the extra effort helps you have a better understanding of your money, which makes it easier to develop better habits. It also forces couples to sit down once a month to review their accounts and manually update them, as well as keep account numbers and passwords offline to protect accounts from potential fraud and identity theft.

HelloWallet 
By now you know that financial experts routinely advise that you have 6 to 10 months

of salary saved. While many people know they need to save more, actually doing it and knowing how much they need to save is not always easy to figure out. HelloWallet, an online financial wellness company, launched a free tool that allows users to calculate an emergency savings goal for themselves, based on their expenses, lifestyle, and earnings. For example, a two-income family that has 80% of income going toward fixed expenses needs a much larger emergency savings fund than a couple that could live off just one person’s salary should a job loss occur. And since most people aren’t saving enough for emergencies, aiming for a specific target can make it easier and less overwhelming to set money aside.

(Continued on next page)

FileThis
If you struggle to keep track of an ever-growing collection of financial paperwork, this tool is for you. FileThis is a digital filing cabinet that automatically uploads financial account information, bills, W-2s,  health insurance information, tax documents, and other essential paperwork from banks to insurance companies. All the data is encrypted and can be downloaded (or deleted) at any time. The “freemium” model offers free automatic uploads from up to six institutions, and then costs $2 a month for up to 12 connections to institutions. The rates increase with additional connections.

Puddle
Sometimes people just need extra cash for things. Most Americans don’t have access to liquid cash when they need it, and this tool meets that need. Aimed at consumers with limited access to traditional credit sources, Puddle, makes it easy to borrow and lend money to friends, family members, and other users through small, short-term loans. Over $1 million has been borrowed through the website, with amounts ranging from $250 to $2,000 for periods between three and six months.

A Simple Notebook
Whatever budgeting tool you ultimately use, the notebook method is another way to easily and reliably track your expenses, and should be your first move. You can’t fill out a new budget with a bunch of guesses, after all. After a month of tracking all your expenses (all of them!), you’ll have a clear picture of where your money’s going, and you’ll have most of the key details to plug into your official budget.

Envelopes
This is Dave Ramsey’s preferred method of household budgeting. Once you’ve figured out your budget categories and target amounts with your spending notebook, you label a bunch of envelopes and fill them with the appropriate amount of cash. The benefit here is that you aren’t using credit, and by spending cash, you’re much closer to your money — you literally feel it slipping through your fingers with every purchase. Note that you don’t need an envelope for every expense category, just those that tend to get away from you, like food or entertainment.