Managing a monthly budget is key to financial success, and everyone has their own way of doing it. 
We’d love to know—how do you manage your budget each month? 
Vote and let us know your go-to method! Feel free to share any tips or strategies in the comments below—we’re all here to learn from each other. 
Automated tools all share one same problem - not intelligent enough. Therefore, at this stage, still prefer the old-school method, using spreadsheets to track. Using spreadsheets have the flexibility to make everything to exact what I need. Visualizing charts and tables to the way I like. These are not necessarily the case on some budgeting tools.
Currently I use spreadsheet, plus WalletApp (by budgetbakers, I’m not affiliated with this company). Spreadsheet are used for specific budgeting tracking purposes, like planning a trip, planning a holiday, etc. I still find spreadsheets are easy to do such things comparing to other trip itinerary apps. I use WalletApp to track my daily expenses across all of my accounts. I have multiple credit cards and bank accounts. I usually spend 20 minutes every weekend to compile all my records to this app, and this app can show me some key information such as cash flow, category expenses, upcoming bill payments (I need to set this up), historical comparisons, etc. I found these are pretty handy and let me know what I spent, and where did my money go. This app supports bank sync, but I don’t trust them, and the system is highly unstable (most of the bank needs 2FA, and it keeps kicking the authentication off, so the sync cannot work).
My dream automated tools are some tools can know my life, can track all of my account, can expect some of my spendings, like my monthly bill payments, regular grocery shopping expenses, etc. When I am planning to spend some big figures, my automated app/tool can remind me how much are left, how much should I spend, or whether I should have this expense or not. Probably brining AI to this field might help, but the privacy is always the problem. There’s a long road to go.
Completely agree @futandrew, I’ll use Excel for my annual budgeting as I find it’s easier to see the whole picture vs apps and lots of flexibility with formulas and charts. I also like that I control the inputs and can drop in my CC statements and bills.
Have you explored the Neo insights feature? I’ll use that to understand my regular cashflow and outflows, and all within the Neo app so no need to link another app with your personal info… Would love to hear your thoughts on how we can improve it to better suit your needs!
I will definitely give a try when I use Neo more (probably in the future when the new premium cash back card is announced). Will share my thoughts afterwards!
Budgeting is hard because even if you set very specific goals, there is no ability to easily track spending across accounts and tracking every single purchase manually is way too much work. Here’s my take on what can be done better:
• add ability to set targets for categories and have the app notify user with encouragement for staying on track and give alerts if spending is excessive vs the target before the month or any specified period ends;
• add ability to benchmark against other users to let users know if they spend more than average or less;
• add notifications when you notice a change in behaviour, similar to how iPhone automatically notifies you that you are walking more/less than average.
• add ability to add friends or family members and benchmark against them to keep each other accountable, with more gamification like in duolingo;
• add ability for users to self-disable their ability to spend after the budget limit is hit so they cannot spend over the target they set for themselves;
• add ability to turn off spending for certain categories, e.g. allow people with addictions to disable spending on their addictions (e.g. alcohol, cigarettes, cannabis, junk food etc) or let users limit the frequency of transactions in specific categories to make it easier for users to achieve their goals;
• add ability to connect other accounts to see all spending in one app;
• ask users about goals, then provide recommendations based on these goals, don’t trick users into self-destructive behaviour by pushing offers that offer instant gratification but hurt long-term goals
Neo needs to have the ability to adjust categories and sort spending for it to be useful as a budgeting tool. The insights helps me quickly review credit statements but as a budgeting tool it’s very limited to the point of being harmful if someone relied solely on it as a budgeting tool.
Also once you could adjust categories, having alerts and notifications for when each category is about to go over budget would be the best tool ever… but I know this is a credit card not a do everything financial service.
Hey Frank! I hear you on needing more flexibility with adjusting categories and setting alerts, its a great suggestion and its a feature I think many people would find useful. (including myself) This is something I can definitely bring up with our product team to keep in mind for future improvements.