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SushiBudget

A brief introduction to my budgeting program, SushiBudget.

I haven’t written a lot about it yet, but the basic ideas in my app are this:

  1. It doesn’t care about your income
  2. Set a upper limit on spending - anything beyond that goes into savings (I have mine set at half my income since I’m single)
  3. Create categories - anywhere between 2 (want, need) or dozens (I’m right about 15 I think)
  4. Place a absolute limit on each category
  5. Schedule all transactions that you know will occur (for instance - in Car Gas I know I have to fill up twice a month, so I have two Planned Transactions for the approximate amount I s pend each time)
  6. Split up any non-monthly costs into monthly savings goals and make them Planned Transactions as well - keep a separate account for each or for the medium term cash pool and make transfers to that account when the Planned Transaction date occurs
  7. Before making any purchase, check the category for that month - it will tell you a few things: a) how much you can spend this pay period, b) how much you have spent, and c) how much you already have planned to spend. This basically ensures that Planned Transactions are treated as if they already occurred - overspending is a lot harder when you act as if it’s already spent.
  8. Any transaction that matches Planned Transaction is tagged with that one, and the totals adjusted to match how much was really spent.

Kind of a brain dump dump, but I feel like this is a pretty good approach. It would be totally possible to do this with a spreadsheet - but the key for me anyway is that I check the remaining amount available for a particular category BEFORE deciding to make a purchase. That’s the entire crux of it, seems like the only way to make sure you constrain spending. So to that end, I have made the app super fast to load on my iPhone, but not iPhone specific so that I can work with it on my computer as well.