What software do you recommend for Creating a To-The-Penny, To-The-Day Budget?
"I've tried Mint, and I've tried Quicken. Now, I think Quicken is an annoying, crashy little piece of software, but it is also quite capable; overall I think it has the features you want. You can enter your bills, broken down by category, in advance. You can enter your paychecks, broken down by category (gross income, federal income tax, state income tax, social security, SDI, transfers to tax-protected 401(k) account, etc) in advance. You can enter in your stock trades and it can tell you how much you'll need to end up paying in capital gains taxes. You can even enter in your stock option vesting schedule in advance (it's a royal pain because you can't go back and change anything without deleting everything, but you can do it). It'll forecast your bank account balance in all of your bank accounts in advance with a shiny chart. It'll even model your loans, if you set it up right. I didn't do too much with the ""budgeting"" tools per se, but the account-balances-daily features sound like the closest thing to what you're looking for that's likely to exist. The only thing that's a trifle tricky is that transfers from one account to another may take multiple days (hello, ACH) and you'll have to decide whether to record them at departure or arrival." I really don't know about will it help you, but here is what I do: It is not classic solution, but maybe it will work for you (works for me very well). "I wrote a little program one time to try to do this.  I think I wrote it in Python or something. The idea was to have a list of ""projected expenses"" where each one would have things like the amount, the date of the next transaction, the frequency of the transaction, and so on.  The program would then simulate time, determining when the next transaction would be, updating balances, and so on.  You can actually do a very similar thing with a spreadsheet where you basically have a list of expenses that you manually paste in for each month in advance.  Simply keep a running balance of each row, and make sure you don't forget any transactions that should be happening. This works great for fixed expenses, or expenses that you know how much they are going to be for the next month.  If you don't know, you can estimate, for instance you can make an educated guess at how much your electric bill will be the next month (if you haven't gotten the bill yet) and you can estimate how much you will spend on fuel based on reviewing previous months and some idea of whether your usage will differ in the next month.  For variable expenses I would always err on the side of a larger amount than I expected to spend.  It isn't going to be possible to budget to the exact penny unless you lead a very simple life, but the extra you allocate is important to cushion unexpected and unavoidable overruns. Once you have this done for expenses against your bank account, you can see what your ""low water mark"" is for the month, or whatever time period you project out to.  If this is above your minimum, then you can see how much you can safely allocate to, e.g. paying off debt.  Throwing a credit card into the mix can make things a bit more predictable in the current month, especially for unpredictable amounts, but it is a bit more complicated as now you have a second account that you have to track that has to get deducted from your first account when it becomes due in the following month.  I am assuming a typical card where you have something like a 25 day grace period to pay without interest along with up to 30 days after the expense before the grace period starts, depending on the relationship between your cut-off date and when the actual expense occurs."
I would suggest that you try ClearCheckbook.  It is kind of like Mint, but you can add and remove things (graphs, features, modules) to make it as simple or diverse as you need it to be.  It should be a workable solution for simply tracking both income and expenses, yet it will also provide extra features as needed. There is a free option as well as a paid option with added features.  I have not used ClearCheckbook before, but according to their features page it looks like you may have to upgrade to the paid option if you want to have complete tagging/custom field flexibility. I like Pocketsmith for simple cashflow forecasting. I use Moneycenter for more complex tracking. "It comes down to the resolution you want to have on your personal finances.  A package like GNUCash allows you to easily answer questions like ""Exactly how much do I spend on interest per month/year/decade.""  Same with pretty much any other expense, liability or asset you have whether it be taxes, utilities, your home equity or your net worth.  The other tools you mention are nice, and certainly convenient, but they tend to lump things together in broad strokes and omit many categories altogether (taxes).  Ultimately by having such a fine grained accounting tool, you can target small or large things to better budget your money.   Another thing a package like GNUCash provides is a single, private place to consolidate all of your finances.  This is nice for things like net worth and asset accounts that you might not want to give a company access to. Finally, GNUcash in particular helps normal people think like accountants.  Rather than lump everything into 'income' and 'expenses', once you start using GNUCash you'll start thinking in terms of equity, liabilities, net-worth and assets in addition to income and expenses.  This gives me a much more accurate view of my finances and helps me better target areas for improvement.  In short, it helps me to see the broader picture which helps me to keep my eye on the prize - which of course is to not have to worry about money at all." I use MoneyStrands (formerly called Expensr), but mostly just to track expenses and look at reports on my spending habits. It has some really pretty charts, with the ability to drill down into categories and sub-categories, or graph monthly spending for any custom date range. It does a half-decent job of auto-categorizing the imported bank transactions, and you can set up additional rules for common vendors, but I still have to do some manual work after each import. It does a good job of integrating my credit cards, bank accounts, and I can even manually add cash transactions. It has some basic budgeting capabilities, but they're not very useful for someone who needs to carefully budget thier monthly spending. Another one I've heard about is mint.com, but it only supports American banks (last I heard, anyway). I can personally recommend MoneyWell. I've been using it for about a month now, and version 1.5 that was just released is a great upgrade from the previous version. The developer was very responsive during the open beta period, and from what I understand an iPhone version is in the works. (and no, I don't work for the publisher!) That aside, I've used a few other packages. I tried out iBank, which was fairly nice, but the account downloading functionality left a lot to be desired. I come from a MS Money background, and I am used to a seamless, reliable download scheme, and iBank's was (unfortunately) neither. Otherwise the interface was very nice. I had settled on MoneyDance before I found MoneyWell, and it's a pretty nice package. Unfortunately it's a Java application and doesn't adhere to most OSX interface practices. While the account downloading is substantially better than iBank's, the ugly interface made moving away from it fairly easy once I found something that had feature parity. Determining how much you should budget to spend on any area of your budget is one of those hard topics to find good information about.  Part of the problem is that everyone has different priorities and needs, and incomes and expenses vary greatly depending upon where you live and your career choices. The best thing you can do is track your spending for 1-3 months (you can use the envelope system if you need to, to track and control how much you spend on miscellaneous things like lunches, coffee, etc).  The precision is important, though you probably dont need to measure to the penny, however you should capture all the areas where you spend money (even if you later gather them into more broad areas). Split your spending into three broad areas, and try to limit the spending for each of those areas to the stated percentages (adjust for your preferences). You state net Income $2600, and you stated you have $1731 of known expenses, so you are spending another $870 on groceries, debt payments, restaurants, unplanned expenses, and emergencies. Essentials (50%,$1300) - rent, transportation, food, utilites Total $972+groceries (you probably spend $400-600 on groceries, so your essentials are higher by $100-300 than you can afford.  You should try to cut your electricity usage ($30-50), and you may be able to find cheaper car insurance (save $20). Financial Priorities (30%,$780) - savings, debt payments Total $376, nearly 15% before you pay for credit cards and savings.  Please focus on paying off your debts (credit cards, window loan, student loans).  You are spending almost 10% of your income on student loans, and you cannot afford much other debt. Lifestyle (20%,$520) Total $279, over 10% of your income on communications!  Please try to cut cellphone, and DirectTV costs, at least until you have reduced debt. Since you have internet, your wife could use a voip provider (vonage, ooma telo, etc) or get an ipod touch and use skype or similar, at least until you get out of debt. You might consider trying to find a way to earn extra money, until you have paid off either the loan for windows, your credit card debt, or one of your student loans. "Aside from the fundamental points brought up in other answers (which is important), there are a number of choices when it comes to budgeting software. Software like this can help you organize fixed reoccurring costs (rent and phone) as well as variable costs (food and events). Mint is probably the most popular, but just search ""budgeting software"" to get an idea of what's out there. Some can also help you visualize your spending with reports and dashboards. Some help out with paying bills on a schedule (this may help avoiding late payments). Some even link up with your bank/credit card accounts." First:  great job on getting it together.  This is good for your family in any respect I can think of.  This is a life long process and skill, but it will pay off for you and yours if you work on it. Your problem is that you don't seem to know where you money goes.  You can't decide how whacky your expenses are until you know what they are.  Looking at just your committed expenses and ignore the other stuff might be the problem here.  You state that you feel you live modestly, but you need to be able to measure it completely to decide. I would suggest an online tool like mint.com (if you can get it in your country) because it will go back for 90 days and get transactions for you.  If you primarily work in cash, this isn't helpful, but based on your credit card debt I am hoping not.  (Although, a cash lifestyle would be good if you tend to overspend.) Take the time and sort your transactions into categories.  Don't setup a budget, just sort them out.  I like to limit the number of categories for clarity sake, especially to start. Don't get too crazy, and don't get too detailed at first.  If you buy a magazine at the grocery store, just call it groceries. Once you know what you spend, then you can setup a budget for the categories.  If somethings are important, create new categories.  If one category is a problem, then break it down and find the specific issue. The key is that you budget not be more than you earn but also representative of what you spend. Follow up with mint every other day or every weekend so the categorization is a quick and easy process.  Put it on your iPhone and do it at every lunch break.  Share the information with your spouse and talk about it often. I would investigate mint.com further.  Plenty of people have written off using them because Intuit purchased them, but that seems like cutting of your nose to spite your face. I think mint.com is worth it for its Trends functionality alone, not to mention its automatic categorization of your purchases, reminders when bills are due, notifications of increased credit card interest rates, and overdraft notices. I don't think mint.com schedules bills & deposits, but it tracks stocks & mutual fund investments and compares your portfolio returns against Dow Jones, S&P 500, or NASDAQ if you wish.  I'm not sure I see the advantage of manual transaction entry, but you can add cash or check transactions manually.  As I mentioned earlier, automated categorization is a great feature.  In addition, you can tag certain transactions as reimbursable or tax-related. If the primary feature you're interested in is stock quotes, maybe something like Yahoo Finance or Google Finance will be enough. hledger is a free software, cross-platform double-entry accounting tool I've been working on for a while. It has command-line and web-based interfaces to your local data, and some other interesting features. There's also ledger (http://wiki.github.com/jwiegley/ledger/) which is command-line only. These are.. different, but worth a look for some folks. "I'm currently using You Need A Budget for this. It lets you track spending my category and ""save"" money in particular accounts from month to month. They also have some strong opinions about how one should manage one's cashflow, so check it out to see if it'll work for you. It's neither web-based nor free, but the licensing terms are very reasonable." I use iBank for Mac to keep track of my expenses. I also use the iPhone version since they can sync over Wi-Fi and I can capture expenses right on the spot instead of trying to remember what I spent on when I turn on my laptop. If held in one savings account, how can I easily manage what percentage is planned for which   purpose? I used a spreadsheet for some years, but found it clumsy for everyday use. Thus I wrote some software which my wife and I use for our short-term as well as long-term planning, available at http://budgeter.sourceforge.net. It specifically helps with splitting the money in one or several accounts into logical categories. (The software is not the most user-friendly ever, so there may be better suggestions that follow, but it works well for us. Please feel free to suggest improvements to it as well.) YNAB runs on Mac, Win, and Linux. A bond fund has a 5% yield. You can take 1/.05 and think of it as a 20 P/E.  I wouldn't, because no one else does, really. An individual bond has a coupon yield, and a YTM, yield to maturity. A bond fund or ETF usually won't have a maturity, only a yield.