Where Does My Money Go, a Personal Finance App
The purpose of this app is to help you improve your financial position. This will improve your ability to take advantage of the opportunities life presents you with.
Having money definitely doesn't buy you happiness, but it does remove a lot of things that cause unhappiness.
Once you are able to see how your income, expenses and lifestyle are tied together, you will be able to make better financial decisions for you.
This app does that by creating a cash flow table from your bank transactions, categorised your way, so you can quickly and easily determine if you are spending your money wisely.
Why Use a Cash Flow Table for Income and Expense Tracking
It is quicker and easier to obtain the important information by looking at a cash flow table rather than a long list of transactions (eg your bank statement). This means you can spend more time thinking about the financial impacts of your decisions.
Look at the cash flow table below and see how quickly you can answer the questions listed.
The line marked Subscriptions, darker colour and left justified, contains the totals per month of all the lines underneath which are lighter in colour and right justified. The columns of the table are for the different months.
- How much did I spend on subscription services last year?
- Did I reduce the amount I spend on subscription services over the year?
- When did Docplay stop charging me?
- Did I only start Stan after cancelling Binge and Kayo?
The line marked Subscriptions contains the totals per month, and the last column on the right hand side is the total of the columns in the line. Answer $2,504.11.
The line marked Subscriptions contains the totals per month, and these are reducing.
The line marked Docplay shows last payment went out in December.
If you look at the lines marked Binge & Kayo and Stan you can see that yes I did.
Your First Time
The first time you use this app, it's very likely you will be horrified at how much you spend on stuff you no longer use, and how many "less than amazing" decisions you have made.
This is also the point of this app. Stop paying for things you no longer use, and acknowledge all of those "less than amazing" decisions as learning opportunities.
Within the app you can create multiple highlights to keep track of the rows in the cash flow table that you want to monitor. For example you could create a highlight called "things I want to cancel" and then tag the rows you want to see go to zero.
Use Budgets to Plan the Future
The next phase of managing your finances is to see the financial effects of your future plans. The best way of doing this is to produce a cash flow forcast (called a budget in this app). These "what if" scenarios will help you plan and take advantage of the opportunities life throws at you.
- Currently renting and thinking about buying a house? There are a bunch of new payments such as mortgage, home insurance, rates, and maintenance costs. Then you will have to pay one off costs such as removalists, new furniture.
- Want to quit your job and go travelling? Great idea, YOLO (You Only Live Once), can you rent out your place and cover the mortgage? How long will your money last you? Not long enough, OK then how long do you need to save for?
- Want to retire? What will your expenses look like? Can you cover them? Will you have a buffer?
Failing to plan is planing to fail. This app allows you to have multiple budgets and see the effects of each on your cash flow table.
That One Special Ingredient
Learning how to manage your money is a process and you need to allocate time to it. Doing a little each month is better than a lot once a year. This app will provide you the resources you need to become really good at it.
You don't need to be good at maths, the app does all the adding up, you just need to be able to consider your finances under different scenarios based upon your options. It's going to be different for everyone.
Using this app will enable you to be presented with the right information that allows you to do that.
- Control you finances, know exactly how much goes out each month and where it goes so you don't waste any of it.
- Steer your life your way, understand your options. By accurate planning you will know if your cash flow will become a problem. No one ever lends money to those that really need it.
Initially it's going to take a bit of time to set everything up the way you want to, then it should be a regular few hours a month.
