Career By Design

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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------Original Message------

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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I personally use the app called Mint, I find the layout makes it really easy to track spending and budget.

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William Wang S.M.ASCE
Fremont CA
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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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Carlos,

I also use spreadsheets for the same reason you do, it forces me to look at every single transaction and ensure its properly categorized.  I do this around tax time since I'm already looking over all my finances anyway.  Usually I take the last 4 to 6 months expenditures from our daily spending accounts (credit card and debit account) and do as you do, sort them into 15-20 expense categories.  I then compare my findings against a previously determined budget from the last year and see where I ended up.  Some areas of spending are easy to explain (ie. if there was an increase in travel or child care expenses, etc...) but others are nice to dial in (if we went over budget on dining out or entertainment).  From there I have a conversation with my family and we move forward.

I've tried tracking every single expense for a year and going over it monthly with my family to dial things in.  This only created tension when it came to spending and money.  If your fortunate enough to not live pay check to pay check (I recognize not all of us are this fortunate), I'd recommend only performing this analysis every once in a while.  However, if you are trying to pay down large loans, have low income, or other such unfortunate circumstances, I'd definitely recommend keeping a close eye on your finances.

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David Coe P.E., M.ASCE
Charlotte NC
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Original Message:
Sent: 01-19-2020 17:06
From: Carlos Zuluaga
Subject: What tool do you use for budgeting when it comes to personal finance?

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.

------------------------------
Carlos Zuluaga Ph.D., EI, A.M.ASCE
Ph.D. Student, Civil Engineering
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