Recommendations for tools for analysing household budgets?

Up to now, to analyse my household budget I basically do the following:

1. Download, say, a year's worth of current account/credit card statements in CSV format (the vast majority of my expenditure is from the current account/debit card, credit card and a little with the likes of PayPal)
2. Import the data into a spreadsheet
3. Eliminate outlier/once-off/non-recurring large transactions that would skew things
4. Manually categorise/group related transactions under common headings (e.g. groceries, insurances, taxes, etc.) - this requires the most effort since the bank account statement headings aren't always consistent
5. Summarise

I was just wondering if anybody had any recommendations on how better to automate this? Either using (ideally free) tools/scripts or maybe even AI?

I see YNAB mentioned/recommended here but I don't fancy paying c. $100 p.a. for something like this.

Thanks.

Excel and separate accounts for separate outgoings?

I get paid fortnightly. Everything that I can schedule to go out fortnightly goes out fortnightly, including:

• Mortgage (edit: I've got a fixed rate of 2.35% for another 2 years, a low balance and over 80% equity, and I'm paying more than twice the fortnightly repayment so I feel very comfortable investing and putting into my pension as well)
• CU Joint Account for groceries (can be used for other family purchases)
• Revolut Joint Account for child's long term investment (used for nothing else)
• Trading 212 Account for long term investments

I've got a separate account for all the bills which can only be paid monthly, such as pension, insurances, mobile, bins etc. This is used for nothing else.

The amount for groceries was set by trial & error. We started off low-balling it and increased it until we reached the point where we consistently have a balance of about €2 the day before payday! Underspending isn't an issue, because we can always find a purpose for the cash if we find ourselves with a surplus!

So basically my wages come in and mostly immediately disappear. The bit that's left over is more or less for my hobbies. The only account I pay any fees on is the CU joint current account. I have a salary deduction for other savings which covers more frequent expenses such as holidays etc.

I get zero angst about keeping money for bills that come due at the end of the month- I never see that money so I don't miss it. I have to do very little thinking about my money because most of it's being put away somewhere automatically. Honestly the reduction of the mental burden by having separate accounts & automation is great. And it makes it much easier to make sure I always pay myself first.

• I do use my credit card as well for smoothing of income & current expenditure because (because of a few factors) my monthly net income isn't consistent throughout the year. I think I paid about €30 in interest last year, which is worth it.

See below copied in from Excel

1. Check the format your AI agent of choice can read.
2. Download a year's supply of transactions from your bank. You should be able to do this in the required format.
3. Remove personal data from the spreadsheet.
4. Upload spreadsheet to Gemini. [This is not a recommendation for Gemini; it's just the one that read my spreadsheet.]
5. Gemini will summarize expenditure / income based on the headings in the spreadsheet, i.e. the one's used by your bank.
6. You can do a global replace on the spreadsheet, e.g. Pret a Manger / Insomnia / O'Briens as 'Coffee' etc. to make headings more meaningful.

Would the 100 USD not be net neutral if it helps you save the equivalent or more? I found the An Post App handy as a free option. But stick to plain old excel and rounded estimates rather than actuals tbh! Esp during the times when cashflow was on a knife edge!!!

BIG-notorious said:

Excel and separate accounts for separate outgoings?

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Thanks, but that (at least the first part) is basically what I'm doing already but my key question is if there might be some better/more efficient/more automated way to do what I'm doing - in particular in relation to my point #4 above?

misemoi said:

Would the 100 USD not be net neutral if it helps you save the equivalent or more?

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I just don't want to pay.

misemoi said:

I found the An Post App handy as a free option

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Unfortunately, it isn't compatible with my phone for some reason.

Have you tried the An Post Money Manager?


I actually wrote an article about this the other day. Tracking your spending it useful at the beginning but after a while it is meaningless. You should create good habits from it, know how much you need to save, how much you need for the household bills, how much for personal spending etc. Form good habits and you won't need to track your spending then.

https://www.bluewaterfp.ie/financial-planning/tracking-your-expenditure-to-form-good-habits/ (Tracking your expenditure to form good habits)

@ClubMan it's more spend analysis than budgeting you're looking for?

What's the purpose of the spend analysis?

If it's just to know fair enough, but if it's to help plan & control your future spending I'd use a different approach. I'd agree with @Steven Barrett that this has limited utility.

I find it generally much easier to control what's going in than measure what's going out, which is why most of my stuff is "set it & forget it". Controlling most inputs automatically controls most outputs, and controlling most outputs provides me with enough space to comfortably have a couple of holidays a year as well as various things which I'd consider luxuries.

ClubMan said:

Eliminate outlier/once-off/non-recurring large transactions that would skew things

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For cash flow reasons I think you should not ignore 'big ticket' items, e.g. expenditure on Christmas; holidays; renewal of car and house insurance; car service, etc. i.e. annual items that usually cannot be paid for out of your current salary cheque. When you identify these you should 'pay the bill in advance', i.e. divide the annual amount by 12 and move this amount each month into a savings a/c. Then when the large transaction arrives you should be able to pay it without impacting on day-to-day expenditure.

Steven Barrett said:

Have you tried the An Post Money Manager?

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ClubMan said:

Unfortunately, it isn't compatible with my phone for some reason.

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PMU said:

For cash flow reasons I think you should not ignore 'big ticket' items, e.g. expenditure on Christmas; holidays; renewal of car and house insurance; car service, etc

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I agree but I was actually referring to once off things like my divorce legal bill and cash settlement last year, expenditure preparing a second property for sale arising from that, inheritances in recent tests, and stuff like that.

ClubMan said:

Unfortunately, it isn't compatible with my phone for some reason.

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Maybe don't use your phone and use your laptop?

ClubMan said:

I was just wondering if anybody had any recommendations on how better to automate this?

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Sorry can't help with the automate bit as I would highly advise that when it comes to tracking and budgeting you do it manually
And do it as a daily activity at first and weekly when you've built up the habit, monthly to me feels like a chore
I've been using MS Excel but I'm sure Google would have a free version that would give you the info in the form that you want
and I presume like Excel it can be both done on computer and phone

The reason I say to do it manually is that it kind of commits your spending to memory and keeps it to the forefront when you do spend
I know for me if it was automated I wouldn't get the same meaning or understanding from the analysis of the figures
And the longer you're tracking, you automatically start to see the trends in spending, notice the price differences and where you need to make changes or improvements

You've seen my thread 20 years of tracked spending, the spreadsheet that I have posted there is the one I use for my yearly tracking
except on the yearly one each entry has a small note attached so as I can see who, what, where and when of that transaction

For me I just don't think you get that kind info from an automated tracker

Persia said:

Maybe don't use your phone and use your laptop?

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Why assume he has a laptop machine?

Persia said:

Maybe don't use your phone and use your laptop?

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It's an Android/iPhone app so my Windows/Linux computers are no use unless I go to the trouble of running an Android emulator/virtual machine or something like that. And that's far too much hassle.

BIG-notorious said:

What's the purpose of the spend analysis?

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To know where the money goes, to plan for future expenditure, to identify if/where savings can be made, to plan for how much I need to take early (age 58) from my pension to top up a relatively small amount of other income that I have now that I'm 3+ years finished with paid employment (due to burnout and disillusionment) and with no urge or pressure to go back, and to arrange my income in a tax efficient way and so that it doesn't impact my son's eligibility for his SUSI 3rd level grant.

On reflection (and following comments offline from a trusted source) I'm probably overthinking this and having already identified that I can comfortably cover normal outgoings with a tax free income of c. €30K (my tax credits cover just under that) there's probably no need to keep doing the analysis on a regular basis.

But the original question about tools to help automate such analysis is still valid and maybe relevant to others...

Cervelo said:

I've been using MS Excel but I'm sure Google would have a free version that would give you the info in the form that you want
and I presume like Excel it can be both done on computer and phone

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Yes, I generally use Google Drive/Sheets and/or LibreOffice/Calc for spreadsheets and the rest of those suites for other "office" type activities.