If your like me you struggle to make sure all your monthly bills are met in a manner that leaves you completely at ease and yet allows you to try and get rid of that debt you have in your life.  I have been using a great application for the Mac called debtinator and it really was what got my monthly bills under control. But it had a single achilles heal, (It won’t import transactions from my bank) a flaw that I have high hopes the developer will eventually iron out.  Until then I have moved on, going from app to web app to app until I had a friend introduce me to NeoBudget.

Neobudget is strongest where debtinator was weakest, it imports like a fiend and is easy to use allowing you to overdraw an envelope, but not the account while importing when needed.  That doesn’t sound desirable but it is needed when you have an unexpected expense occur and want to classify it correctly. Once your done with the import any robbing from the peter envelope to pay the paul negative envelope can be performed.  It takes a while to get all your expenses, debts and savings/goals figured out but once you do you can finally get to the paying down your debt.  I have created an envelope for my credit cards that will all me to essentially once one is paid off continue to save the same amount from each check, using that amount to pay off the next one that much faster.  Your probably familiar with the snowball method, it is basically just that.  There is a worksheet on the website that you can use to estimate how soon your debt can be paid off if you basically do what I was referring to.

So how much does all this cost and is it secure?  Well first it’s $2.50 a month or $25 a year, secondly you don’t enter any really sensitive info such as logins or account numbers into the site.  You will enter or import transactional info and your pay info is there so it’s not wide open by any means,  the whole site is accessed through an SSL secured website, so no snooping should occur.  I have been using it for 2 weeks and so far so good.  Debtinator really thought like I think, showing every transaction and bill when it would be paid, but those non planned items killed me entering them by hand daily.  I hope debtinator adds the ability to import my transactions from the bank, but until it does I ‘ll be pretty happy with NeoBudget.  Almost forgot there is a mobile version for the app that allows or checking and entry of transactions from your iphone or similar web enabled phone.