PearBudget
“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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Jeff said,
October 4, 2006 @ 8:48 am
It’s free, so it is worth downloading… but it is pretty lame. A few simple formulas entered into Excel can give you something much more powerful. Spending time learning how to use Excel is also free…
Andy said,
December 7, 2006 @ 6:39 pm
Thanks for this. I just downloaded it, and it looks fantastic. Did Jeff even look at Pear Budget? Wow, wow, wow.
Elissa said,
January 23, 2007 @ 3:52 pm
It may not be the most glamorous spreadsheet that has ever graced Excel, but it’s certainly very useful and efficient when it comes to budgeting. Jeff is right, you can totally make something like that yourself, and that’s what I was planning on doing. But I just don’t have the time to let my perfectionist self sit down for weeks creating the most perfect spreadsheet. I needed to get my finances in order STAT so this was perfect for me. I tried looking for a generic MS Excel budgeting template, but NOTHING out there comes close to PearBudget… unless you make it yourself of course.
It’s nice to finally have a fuller understanding of my finances. Being able to actually SEE how much money is going out and how much is coming in and how much money I have left over and how much I’ll need by the 1st of the month, it’s priceless.
So thank you for posting this! I downloaded it at the end of ‘06 but never really stuck to using it. But now that it’s a new year I decided to start things off right and this has turned my financial nightmares into something more tolerable.