2018-07-17

Budget Simple

Of the many things you think are good ideas, but rarely do, having a monthly budget is high up on that list for us. I frequently go on spending freezes for a month if I feel I’ve spent a little too much on unneeded things that month. Sometimes it’s just an Amazon freeze (seriously why do they have everything for sale?)!

After awhile you would think, hey maybe just start budgeting and you wont run into this issue. Trust me, I have—numerous times! I’ve used Mint and YNAB on and off over the years to varying degrees of success. However, there’s also been a single pitfall—being able to share the budget with a significant other.

You can share logins, and some budget sites suggest this, however that doesn’t feel right. I want to be able to see our purchases categorized together, but also distinct so that I don’t feel bad for building a bunch of nail polish.

Eventually I gave up, and decided to start working on something myself. Because I’m bad at naming projects (Ukulesa anyone?) I decided to keep things simple this time…so BudgetSimple was born!

The primary goal was to have a simple and straight forward budget application that we could both use together—pretty easy right? Over the next few posts I’ll document some of the issues I’ve run into, and solutions I’ve come up with while tackling this problem!

It’s by no means a finished product as there are still plenty of things I need to complete for it to be an usable budget, but I’ve been learning a lot on this journey and hopefully you will to!

For now, I’ll leave you with the current state of the budget page—it’s simple and provides a quick overview of things in a way that scales down to mobile well.

BudgetSimple Dashboard