Guest Post - Alternatives to Sharing and Tracking Money with Family

21 Apr

Guest Post – Alternatives to Sharing and Tracking Money with Family

Posted in Guest Posts by Guest Poster 4 Comments

(As you might have come to expect, I have the pleasure of sharing another guest blogger’s great post. This week, it’s Amy Silver with a post on methods of tracking your family’s finances. I know it’s pretty tricky something just keeping up with my own finances, so I can just imagine what it must be like to try to manage an entire household’s book. Enjoy the suggestions!)

Families can be expensive and with all those extra mouths to feed and people to buy clothes for, you can soon begin to lose track of your expenses. If you find your finances beginning to slip through your fingers while you lose track of what you’re spending, here are a few ways that you can help you keep on top of your cash issues.

Designate a home ‘accountant’

Although this sounds like someone in your household will need a degree in accounting and complex math to do this, it really isn’t that difficult. Simply give the receipt from anything anyone in your house buys to one person for a month. At the end of the month, the selected person can add up what you spend and have a look for any areas where you can cut costs. The person can even make a budget for individuals or for the house as a whole if they want–it will certainly make keeping track of your money easier.

Share a bookkeeping document

If one person doesn’t want the responsibility of managing the household’s receipts, you can make each member keep track of what they spend themselves. Make sure that you create a spreadsheet or electronic document somewhere on your home computer where everybody can access it. Once you have done this, everybody can add their own personal expenses to the database each day, in order for you to collate the results and analyze your finances at the end of the month.

Personally, I like using Google Docs- given that everyone has a Google account. You can share a spreadsheet and have everybody fill in what they’ve spent. This way it’s editable from anywhere and accessible to multiple people at once.

Use financial services that you can monitor easily

A regular credit card can sometimes be difficult to keep track of as you only get a single statement once a month.

However, there are other prepaid credit cards that allow you to control the balance when you use them, which can be much easier to manage. For example, the REACH card’s account tools allow you to quickly and easily view your transactions online as often as you like. You can even make use of the service to create your own budget and stick to it, and have text and email alerts sent to you to help you control your spending.

Use an app

If you have a smartphone, there are a number of apps you can get which offer services allowing you to control your money and check where it’s going. Some of the best ones are:

Mint – This app automatically brings together all of your financial accounts and stores the information in one place so that you can have an easy overview of your money. The app will also suggest other services that may help you out. [Roger's Note: You do need to open a Mint account through a computer in order to use the Mint cell phone app properly.]
Yodlee – Yodlee is similar to Mint in that it brings your accounts together, but also allows you to pay bills directly from your phone. It also offers money management services for corporate customers.
MySpendingPlan – One nice touch to this app is that you can print off certain vouchers and coupons that help you save on key purchases. Investment ideas are also provided by the service.

There are a number of ways to keep track of your money these days. Which will you use first?

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4 Responses to “Guest Post – Alternatives to Sharing and Tracking Money with Family”

Ravi Gupta
on April 21 2011

Great points! Personally in our family we use a google docs spreadsheet that allows us to share a single document with many different users. This way we can all go in and update and always take a look to see where our money is going.

-Ravi Gupta
Ravi Gupta´s last [type] ..There has to be a better way
Roger, the Amateur Financier
on April 21 2011

@Ravi: I’ve been tracking my money on a spreadsheet myself. I might have to put it on google docs so that my fiancee can easily access it as well.
chicken coops for sale
on September 6 2011

“Personally, I like using Google Docs- given that everyone has a Google account. You can share a spreadsheet and have everybody fill in what they’ve spent.”

I love technology and really love the sharing ability of Google Docs.

You have given me a great idea and I am going to use it from now on.
KristineS
on January 17 2012

My husband put me in charge of tracking our household expenses and keeping our family budget, so you may say that I am the “designated” family accountant. He simply doesn’t have time to deal with this kind of stuff, but I don’t mind as long as he is busy making money And I also use an online personal finance system https://www.inexfinance.com/ that makes this entire process much easier and even enjoyable than a “pen and a paper” approach.
KristineS´s last [type] ..Powerful Online Software For Personal Finance Management and Budgeting