r/budgetingforbeginners

Welcome to the weekly thread for all things budgeting apps!

This is the dedicated space to ask for app recommendations, share your reviews, and discuss the tools you use to manage your money.

• Found an app you love? Tell us what it is and what makes it great.
• Looking for a new app? Describe what features you need, and the community can help.
• Have questions about an app's features? Ask away!

Let's keep the main feed clean and have all our app talk right here. Dive in!

I can't be pedantic and anal about tracking my budget. The only thing that's actually stuck is putting $300 a week into my Groceries Only debit card and if there is no money left I have to eat out of the pantry until following payday. Other than that, I just can't track my numbers.

Hi everyone! CPA here, just want to share an idea that’s helped a few people in my life.

I absolutely hate AI slop and I wrote all this genuinely to procrastinate during work.

Money doesn’t give a shit. Why do we treat it like it does?

Here’s a few ways we fail to recognize money for the sociopathic and painfully accurate mechanism of exchange that it is:

We associate our financial behaviors with what type of person we are. Frugality tends to equate to good and modest and trust worthy (even if we haven’t shed a nickel for a friend or charity in the last decade) while low balance holders carry a lot of shame (and cure that shame with a quick weekend getaway they “deserve”).

We think some purchases are morally good, some are morally bad. You think your buddy is an idiot for the tab he racked up at the bar last night. You spent the same exact amount of money on a family trip to Disney Land that you saved diligently for and you all had an awesome time.

We love to recover sunk costs (which by definition is not possible). If you’ve ever punished yourself financially for some stupid purchase you made yesterday, you’re trying to recover your sunk cost. Maybe you had a shit time at Disneyland and now you’re on a “spend freeze” for some un-calculated and unrealistic time frame. Happy to dive into this more if anyone’s interested.

The point is, the balance goes down based on HOW MUCH you spent, not WHAT you spent it on.

Let’s pretend money is nails in a jar. You spent 700 nails this week. I really don’t care what you hammered them into. You need the remaining 400 nails for groceries and car insurance.

The following week, you might go as far as to say okay, I can use 1000 nails in this time frame *cough* budget
*cough*. If my radiator blows up on Monday, I’m all out of fucking nails. Maybe I do deserve Uber Eats and I am a hard working person and the economy is shit and I want my kids to have a good life and I’m having a good day and I should have an even better day, but I just don’t. Have. Any. Nails. Left. You’re not a bad person for it. You just ran out of nails.

Or maybe nothing unplanned happens and you have 300 nails left at the end of the week. Great! You have extra nails. You’re not a better person for it. You just have more nails.

If anyone’s interested I’d love to dive into how this mindset shift translates to a healthier spending cycle. Thanks for reading!

Do you think tracking expenses is enough, or do you also need a daily money routine?

I noticed that even when I track my spending, it does not always mean I make better decisions.

Sometimes I can see where my money went, but I still repeat the same habits the next week.

Lately, I’ve been thinking a simple daily routine might help more, like:

Checking how much I can safely spend today. Logging purchases before I forget.
Noticing if a purchase was a need or a want.
Saving even a small amount.
Reflecting on what caused overspending.

For beginners, what habit made the biggest difference for you?

Was it tracking every expense, setting a budget, using cash envelopes, checking your balance daily, or something else?

One day I checked my bank balance and genuinely had no idea where the money went 💀

Food?
Random online payments?
“Small” expenses?
No clue.

That’s when I realized most of us don’t actually track money consistently because manual expense tracking is annoying.

So I built Aarthik.

It automatically reads transaction SMS messages and manages expenses for you.

And honestly… seeing your real spending habits is scary 😭

You think:
“I don’t spend that much.”

Then the app shows:

• food delivery attacks
• useless impulse buys
• subscriptions you forgot existed
• those “just 200 rupees” purchases adding up

The painful part?
Most people won’t realize this until they’re already broke at the end of the month.

The smart ones start tracking early.

Does anyone else budget by just checking how much they spent in total each day instead of itemizing every purchase? Does that method actually work long term?

I started with spreadsheets. Built a really nice one, actually. Categories, formulas, conditional formatting, the whole thing. It worked for about six weeks and then collapsed the first time something unexpected happened. Car repair, friend's wedding, dentist bill. Whatever. The spreadsheet didn't know what to do, so I just stopped opening it.

Then I tried apps. Stuck with it for almost a year. The philosophy made sense to me, but every time life moved sideways I'd open the app and feel like I was being audited. Move money from this category, take from that one, justify it to myself, log it. By month three I was avoiding it. By month six I was lying to it. By month nine I was back in spreadsheets.

What finally clicked for me was this: every budgeting tool I'd used assumed the plan was the point. Make the plan, stick to the plan, feel bad when you don't. But the plan isn't the point. The plan is going to break. The point is what you do when it breaks.

I've been using something called Planning Wiser recently. The thing that hooked me is that adjusting the plan is treated as the main event, not a failure state. Unexpected expense comes up, it walks you through where to pull from, protects the stuff you said was non-negotiable, and you're done in like 30 seconds. No guilt, no starting over.

Genuinely curious what people here think. Especially anyone who's bounced off other apps for similar reasons. Is this just me, or does the whole category of tools have this problem?

Link: planningwiser.com

I started tracking my expenses like 2 months ago and honestly didn’t expect it to make such a difference.

I always thought eh it’s just a coffee or its only 15 bucks but then you realize how much random stuff adds up over a month 😅 subscriptions, eating out, little online orders, delivery etc.

At first I tried using notes on my phone but it got annoying really fast so I switched to an expense tracking app mainly because my girlfriend and I wanted to keep track of shared expenses too.

And ngl seeing everything in one place kinda changed how I spend money. I don’t even feel like I’m restricting myself that much, I’m just way more aware now before buying random stuff.

I checked my numbers yesterday and realized I saved around $250 already mostly from eating out less and canceling subscriptions I forgot about lol

Curious if anyone else here tracks their spending? Did it actually help you long term?

Welcome to the weekly thread for all things budgeting apps!

This is the dedicated space to ask for app recommendations, share your reviews, and discuss the tools you use to manage your money.

• Found an app you love? Tell us what it is and what makes it great.
• Looking for a new app? Describe what features you need, and the community can help.
• Have questions about an app's features? Ask away!

Let's keep the main feed clean and have all our app talk right here. Dive in!

Let me know what the hardest or worst part about budgeting is for you, whether it's the worst part of an app that you use, you have difficulty meeting your budget, you just don't really know where to start, it takes too long or any other issue that you have with it, let me hear it.

(I Am Not Promoting) I just want to hear your biggest pain points and if there would be an interest in solving these pain points.

Here's some brutal honesty that some of you might benefit from. If you don't have money allocated for ad spend, it doesn't matter how good your product is, it will fail.

We launched OneBudgetAI and did everything most of you are doing, posting on reddit and realized everyone here is a builder and not your audience so it won't work. You can try to post on subreddits with your audience but risk being banned because there's strict self promo rules.

What are you left with? Aside from going viral on social media or something, it won't work. The only friend is Google Ads who will help you. I posted when we first launched, we got 3k visits once we started ad spending.

We also blew 2k on iNfLuEnCeRs, a whopping 5 sign ups. $500 on google ads gave us over 300. Think about that! So now we're collecting feedback from our users and spend 30% into ads each month.

OneBudgetAI.com is nearing 3k MRR without an app. We also launched a free tier last month for those who like to enter everything manual - you just can't use the AI features since those incur costs.

Past 7 days - we've had 5320 visitors. I hope you got something of value and good luck grinding!!

PS - Don't overpay for AI tools, you only need ChatGPT + Claude!

https://preview.redd.it/42un164v4r0h1.png?width=2038&format=png&auto=webp&s=c3446ee0a2b710179fa6bc785ac63347afec3df8

So my husband and I moved to a new area in December, I am currently 10 weeks pregnant and I stay at home. I want to make a budget for us to make things easier for when the baby is here and to see if it’s possible for me to be a stay at home mom. Any tips?

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I’ve noticed a lot of people download budgeting or expense tracking apps but stop using them after a few weeks.

For people here who actively manage their finances:

What keeps you consistent with a finance app?

Do you prefer simplicity or detailed analytics?

What’s the biggest frustration with current budgeting apps?

What feature actually helps you the most in real life?

I’m curious because I’ve been thinking a lot about how personal finance tools become overwhelming for average users. Many seem packed with features, but daily usability often feels ignored.

Would love to hear real experiences and opinions from this community.