Daily Budget Original 4+

It was unusually difficult to find an budgeting method that didn’t require an online account or - at the other end of the spectrum - required me to basically be my own accountant in the worst way. This is the best mix of detail, privacy, and accessibility that I’ve ever seen in a budget tracking or data utility app in general. I spend very little time thinking about money now, while I’ve saved and invested more than ever since using this app. It gives me the information I need about my spending and gets out of my way otherwise. There is actually a lot of room to budget in different and dare I say creative ways here.

In my case, I’m meticulous but lazy. I track every novel purchase, rounded up to the nearest dollar, but I’ve added regular costs that fluctuate as fixed monthly costs based on their average e.g. a tank of gas every two weeks. That makes my cost of living more or less built in to the budget, so my balance is 100% for food and leisure barring emergencies and other surprises. Psychologically this does wonders; knowing that your needs are financially accounted for makes you feel almost like a kid saving up 10s and 20s for the thing you want. Even if it’s what you would consider pocket change after the bills are paid, you have a clear idea of what you can spend freely. Granted, this is an aspect of household budgeting when done right anyway, here it is achieved with very little effort.

We wholeheartedly appreciate your detailed review! Our app can actually be used in many different ways and we are always interested in learning personal practices of our users so thank you very much for sharing yours!

So I’m actually in college with a semester-based stipend for food bought on campus. The way the university deals with this “meal plan” is quite clunky, so I decided to get my own budgeting app and work out the budget myself.
I mainly care about portioning out a bit of the meal plan each day for big events and such, but the app is also quite functional in that I can transfer all of the collected finance data into a CSV spreadsheet!
Returning to the meal plan, the way the app tries to set up my budget as more income-based than allowance-based is probably useful for most use cases of this app. However, my meal plan is essentially just a gift card that I swipe on campus, with a fixed amount at the start of each semester. In order to get around the “income” problem for this app, I essentially just have the pay period (a setting in the income options) to the duration of the semester. From there, the app calculates how much you get every day, and just gives you that fixed income for as long as you wish. I’ve found that basically for August and January, when I’m not spending meal plan for half of those months, I just subtract all of the accrued savings and continue on with the semester!

Overall, love the app. Easy to use. Also has a good Internet forum on reddit.

Thank you very much for your detailed review! You can also enter your meal plan amount as an extra income and distribute it over the necessary period. In this case it'd be easier to edit it. But in general regular income does the same things with start and end date.

Update after using for 6 weeks: it's even better than I expected. You never know how apps will pan out over the long term, but this is, by a very long way, the best budgeting app I've ever used. I love how I put my fixed costs in and the minimum I want to save and then that's it. Those costs are not relevant to me when they come in (because they are already "paid for" with this budget tool), so I only need to focus on the variable expenses. I don't have any fixed costs in for food because it's so much in my control (e.g., do I really need to buy groceries, or can I eat what's here? Do I have money to go out to eat?). Over Mother's Day weekend expenses got high because I took my mom out for dinner & drinks and bought her a gift. But even with that, this app I helped tremendously. I was "in the orange" for about 5 days, so I just was really-really careful about not spending during that time. Anyway, I could go on...if you don't think budgeting can work for you, try this app. It will surprise you.

Previous review:
I've just started with it, but wow. Very enlightening. I know it'll work. I, too, like that it doesn't automatically load in expenses. I have plenty of apps that do that, and it doesn't help keep my budget going. This has.

Many thanks for your feedback – we are happy to hear that you keep using the app for a long time! We will go on improving Daily Budget for future releases!