“Track everything you spend” is one of the key steps to getting rich slowly. It’s easy to do this after the fact using a personal ledger or software such as Quicken. But how do you plan for expenses?
A budget is the best way to see where your money needs to go. Some people keep detailed budgets, and adhere to them religiously. Others — such as myself — keep loose budgets, and use them simply as guidelines. Whichever kind of budgeter you are, PearBudget is an excellent tool to help the process.
PearBudget is a FREE budgeting program, written in Excel. It can be used by almost any spreadsheet program (Excel, Word, OpenOffice, etc.). Setup is a snap, and it takes less than half an hour a month to maintain it and see how you’re doing. (And—did we mention?—it’s free!)
The brains behind PearBudget are currently developing a web-based version of the software. If you’ve been wanting to start a budget, or have been looking for ways to simplify your existing budget process, give PearBudget a try.
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This article is about Budgeting, Tools
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Download of the Day: PearBudget spreadsheet…
Mac/Windows/Linux: The PearBudget spreadsheet is a handy budgeting template that tracks your income and expenses over time. Any spreadsheet program – from Excel to OpenOffice’s Calc – can open PearBudget, which has one sheet per month with areas alloc…
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Why would anyone spend the $3 PearBudget is launching at, when well-known and widely recognized Quicken OnLine is cheaper? Someone “out the gate” shouldn’t charge more than the likes of Quicken Online (by Intuit) because they will not “Get Rich (even) Slowly.”
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PearBudget’s online service is the best budgeting system I have ever used (and I have used Quicken, Money, Mint, Excel and put budgets together for businesses using Peachtree and Quickbooks). In this case simpler is better as so many people get their budgets so detailed and complicated they don’t even want to use it. It does take discipline, but if one puts the time in to do the data entry you will get an as close to real time snapshot of where you are at with spending and know when you have to “cool” down in some categories. I absolutely love it and think it is well worth the $30 per year, plus my money is going to someone with a small business and not a huge mega corporation like Microsoft. Thanks Charlie Parker at PearBudget – nice stuff!
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The PearBudget Spreadsheet is still available for FREE. They have changed the site though. Go to the site below to download this FREE spreadsheet.
http://www.pearbudget.com/spreadsheet
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