Danielle,
I am happy to hear these topics brought into the attention of this community. Despite the great quality of education we receive, financial education seems to be a topic hard to come by at many schools.
There are many great tools available such as Mint or Personal Capital. These tools extract data from your bank accounts (after you have given them permission, of course) and present you with the data and several graphs. They do a very good job of categorizing your expenses and providing a summary. However, me and my wife use an Excel spreadsheet that we fill manually. We store it at a shared location (e.g., google drive, dropbox). This method, despite being more time consuming, forces us to check every single expense. Of course, being engineers, everything has formulas. The first sheet contains our budget with about 15 expense categories. Then, there is a separate sheet for each month's expenses. We have created conditional formats that show in red when we have exceeded our budget for the month, and a pie chart to understand where most of our money is being spent. The last sheet is a summary of the yearly expenses.
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Carlos Zuluaga Ph.D., EI, A.M.ASCE
Ph.D. Student, Civil Engineering
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Original Message:
Sent: 01-15-2020 16:22
From: Danielle Schroeder
Subject: What tool do you use for budgeting when it comes to personal finance?
Plot Points is a podcast by ASCE that tells the robust story of civil engineering one episode at a time. The podcast is in Season 3 and is looking for answers for their Member Memo questions. This week's question is the following: "What tool do you use for budgeting when it comes to personal finance?"
If interested in a chance to be featured on a future episode of the podcast, record your answer as a voice memo on your phone (60 seconds or so) and email it to <maskemail>ascenews (at ) asce.org</maskemail> with "Member Memo" in the subject line! I submitted an answer to one of the featured questions during Season 1 so feel free to respond here or message me with any questions about the process.
If not interested in recording a voice memo for the podcast, I would love to hear about what you use to budget in this thread! I personally just use Google sheets, but I would love to know what apps are out there. Also, here is the link to this episode in which this Member Memo question was asked: https://news.asce.org/asce-plot-points-season-3-episode-2-the-gift-of-presence/
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Danielle Schroeder EIT, A.M.ASCE
Associate Engineer
Pennoni Associates
Philadelphia PA
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