Drawing up a household budget is an important step to reaching our savings goals. But doing this manually requires regular, time consuming tracking of your spending. For many of us, it’s something that goes forgotten. There are a few online budgeting tools out there but a stand out for us is Xero Personal.

Xero creates very user friendly financial software (see our article on Xero Accounting Software). The layout is intuitive and easy to navigate, even for those who aren’t so financially savvy. The dashboard (your home page) gives you a quick summary of how your saving and spending habits are looking for the month.

Rather than manually entering your spending, Xero can sync with your bank accounts. All you need to do is select a category for each payment. Once Xero learns your spending habits, your regular expenses will be automatically added to a category. You might only spend 5 minutes a month allocating payments to categories.

Xero lets you can create a savings goal and show you with simple graphs how you can achieve it. Xero will tell you how much you need to save each month and you can set aims for how much you want to spend each month in each category.

There are also a few other useful tools that use graphs to help you understand your spending habits in a glance. The program has a free 30 day trial and is $5 per month after that.

See the Xero Personal site
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