About Me 0009: personal finance budgets

A new year often means lofty resolutions, especially when it comes to planning and maintaining a travel budget.

Though there are many personal-finance sites and software out there, this year I'm resolving to use Mint.com's free online tool. Though you can create plans for saving toward retirement and buying a house, I'll be primarily using the site for its Travel Goals, which help you set -- and stick to -- realistic travel budgets.

Though the tool obviously doesn't do the hardest part (you still have to save the money), it does track how far or close you are to achieving your Travel Goal.

For example, say you want to go to Hawaii for a week this summer. Once you create a budget by filling in the estimates for airfare, hotel, meals, and other expenses, you can then specify how much you will contribute to that Travel Goal each month.

If you underestimate how much you'd need to save per month, the online tool points out: "Oh no! You aren't saving enough each month to reach your goal on time." The tool then offers you two ways to fix your Travel Goal: increase your monthly contribution in order to reach your desired travel date or postpone your planned date to fit your monthly contribution.

If you stay on track with saving the specified amount each month, Mint.com's budgeting tool highlights (and adjusts) the projected date of when you can afford to take the trip. Save more, and you could afford to take your trip a month or two earlier.

But if you slack on your monthly savings, the date will be pushed back -- a reality check and an instant motivator. Once you mentally equate an unnecessary clothing purchase or an impulse buy to the consequence of delaying your trip by a month, saving becomes a little more real.

Granted, most people will buy plane tickets and reserve hotels with a credit card several months before actually taking the trip; the tool helps track if you'll be able to easily pay it all off after your trip. After all, nothing ruins a vacation more than coming home to bills that you're not financially prepared to handle.

To fund my travels this year, I've linked my Mint.com account to an ING Savings Account labeled Travel Fund.

How do you stay on track with saving up for a vacation?

[flickr image via epSoS.de]

Gallery: How to create a realistic travel budget

So thinking about starting 2011 with a new and fresh finance app for your new and fresh WP7 device?

You have the chance now! moBudget has just been released for Windows Phone 7.

moBudget is a user friendly budgeting and expense tracking application. It will help you drive and organize both your personal income and outcome budgeting. By doing so, moBudget will also hint you about possible budgeting and money saving opportunities. Its main screen features a summarized dashboard with a set of intelligent indicators which will tell you how you are doing depending on your budgets and on the current date.

Forget about grabbing a calculator each time you need to get any numbers or if worried about making it to the end of the month or not; moBudget will tell you all: what you have, what you will have, what you owe and more. It will either inform, alert or advice you when needed so you don’t need to worry.

By allowing stepping through months, allows you to whether look back to see how you did on previous months or how you will be doing in the upcoming months, so you can fine tune your budgets to the optimal.

Take it with you, record your data and you will see how money won’t cause you a headache anymore!

More after the break.

Key features

Today Hub featuring a main dashboard with intelligent indicators

Upcoming and overdue payments, incomes, bills

Color-based and snapshot styled budget bar graphs for easy reading

Easy and fast input for tracking either expenses, incomes or transfer between accounts

Budget adjustment helper

Actual balance and budget balance adhoc *

Accounts and credit cards usage recording *

Cash flow bar graphs and out of funds predictions *

Credit card payment estimations and warnings

Can create future operations and recurrent operations

Multi currency support

Easy month back and forth navigation

Account balances reconcilation

Password protection in two ways (partial and complete)

Encrypted backups

More…!

* Estimated. Does not pull your bank information, however you can sync balances up to a specific date and moBudget will estimate the current and future balance and cash flow according to the data you register day to day.

Screenshots

So give it a try! App has a 15 day free trial period and currently is at 50% sale for Christmas.

– or- direct download link for Zune.

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Thursday, January 13, 2011

personal finance budgets

Gallery: How to create a realistic travel budget

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