Keeping up With Your Money

Every year when I make New Years Resolutions, I vow to keep a better record of our money. Every year I do a little better than the last but honestly I am no accountant. I know what I need to do but was just not sure how to do it. My husband took over taking care of the budget and bills last year when I was dealing with some health stuff and he is definitely no accountant. Believe it or not, I like running water, dear…and the electricity is nice too…The budget I  had created is a complete mess has simply fallen by the wayside.

Now that the new year is beginning I am ready to take over get things back in order. But I needed a new and better way to keep up with things and I have found it! I have found a simple way to keep up with our finances and keep our budget.

I present to you the IPhone/ITouch app called iReconcile.

One problem that I had is that we have multiple bank accounts. Some are even in other states than the one we live in. Some of the deposits are direct while in other accounts they are not. We are self-employed and so that also tends to complicate things. Brian used one account and I preferred the other that I could rack up airline miles on, but for some things I used another. It was a hot mess. I haven’t even mentioned the business accounts that we carry.  iReconcile has a solution for that. It supports multiple accounts and even transfers between accounts. Whew!

I love the features of iReconcile.

• Multiple accounts (banking, credit, etc.)
• Split transactions
• Transfers between accounts
• Budgets
• Reports
• Memorized transactions with scheduling
• Search
• Export (CSV, QIF)
• Pin number security
• Custom currency by account

One other problem that we had is that Brian would always forget to give me his receipts so it made it nearly impossible to keep the checkbook balanced. I can’t tell you how many times this would throw our balances off. With iReconcile, you can share accounts with other users, and manage your records right at iReconcile.com. Any changes to your data are automatically synchronized with all your devices. So my forgetful hubby can just enter his transaction right into his phone and mine will instantly have the same information. Just like that. No more nagging. Well, almost none..

Another other issue was our actual budget. I used to use a method up different envelopes for each category of the budget except for the things that we had set to auto pay like mortgage, insurances, utility bills. Each month I would start with a new set of envelopes and I would keep all of my receipts in them.  On the outside of the envelope have a spending limit set and written down and then keep a tally of what was spent during the month next to that. When the limit was reached spending stopped.  But that made it hard to budget from one month to the next. What if I was trying to save for something special? It was hard to keep up. With iRconcile, you can designate how much you want to spend in certain categories and even rollover unused funds from one month to the next if you wish, but if you overspend one month it will deduct from the next. LOVE IT!

Because the app allows multiple devices to sync with the account our kids that also have IPhones can keep watch over their savings account balances and watch them grow.

At present the cost of the app is only $2.99 .

I know this will help us to keep our finances in order and manage and stick to our budget. We always have our phones handy and the information is at our finger tips. Since both Brian and I can work together on this, it makes it so much easier to manage. We can hold each other accountable. I am really looking forward to getting this New Year’s resolution of “doing a better job of keeping up with our finances” off my list next year.

I hope the coming new year brings you prosperity and success in all you do.