I decided one of my new year’s resolutions is to keep better track of my finances and to try to maintain a budget. Since I’m thinking about buying a house soon (in a year or 2), I really want to know how much I can actually afford without being house poor. Basically, I don’t want to give up my life and fun just to buy a house!

Anyways, after doing a ton of research on all of the different online web tools that are offered now, I’ve actually settled on an offline excel type sheet called PearBudget. It seems to be the most simple and straightforward way for me to easily see where my money is going and how much I’m actually saving each year. It’s supposed to only take about 10 minutes a week to update. I think I can handle that! Also, it was free.

I’m also going to keep track of my networth by using networthIQ. This way I can see how my investments are doing and where I need to improve on.

I tried out a few different websites but it came down to a combination of these two for me. I’d really like to use Mint but more than half of my banking institutions did not hook up to the service so it was pointless for me. Others might have more luck and I highly recommend going that route if you can. Anybody out there using any cool web finance tools?

*edit: After writing this post, I discovered BudgetPulse and Money Manager EX. I think I might try these as well for a month and then ditch one for the other depending on which I like better. My initial look at them seem promising though!