EveryDollar Review

I’d like to preface this by saying I’m not a financial advisor. That’s something I say not only to cover myself legally but also because I’m genuinely not very good at this stuff and you shouldn’t listen to me.

Of all the stupid takes I’ve heard, one of the worst is my brother’s take on budgeting. According to him, budgeting doesn’t make sense because either his budget would say he had enough money to spend how he wanted in which case he wouldn’t change his behavior or his budget would tell him he didn’t have enough money in which case it would make him unhappy. It reminded me of someone a couple years ago who expressed to me that they didn’t want to take a Covid test because if it came back positive, they wouldn’t be able to go to a party.

There are two types of people: those who enjoy spending money, and those for whom each purchase is a small death, for whom the term “retail therapy” sounds like an oxymoron. (It’s possible my brother falls in between these two camps).

I started budgeting using EveryDollar towards the end of college because, according to Reddit, the free version seemed better than Mint or YNAB. It lets you categorize and group expenses and track transactions for each month. From my experience, it’s successful on that front. It’s easy to track the big categories of necessary expenses, paying off debt, saving, donating, and discretionary. So it’s far better than nothing for people who either consistently over or under spend, and there’s hardly any barrier to entry.

For me, a person who constantly felt financially insecure, it was one of the best lifestyle changes I’ve made. It was reassuring to find that treating myself or going out with friends wouldn’t bankrupt me.

That said, it doesn’t do much that you couldn’t do better with multiple accounts and autopays. If you save, invest, donate, and pay rent automatically after getting your paycheck, then pretty much everything left in your checking account is discretionary. Maybe you keep a small buffer, but you don’t really need a budget beyond that.

That’s all fine, but it made me realize that I use EveryDollar much more to track than to budget, and the real thing I use to moderate my spending is guilt about how much I’ve spent recently. It’s not a big problem because I have all my autopays set up. It just means that I’m still very bad at discretionary spending. I often either delay buying things I want (and can afford) or impulse buy cheap versions of things before I have a chance to overthink.

My plan (which I’ve already implemented for March) is to migrate my budget to a spreadsheet. I have the same basic functionality as EveryDollar (even though spreadsheets are usually inscrutable to me!), monthly tracking in broad categories. But I’m adding a “wishlist” page where I track everything I want. I can take time to find the most cost-effective one, and rank them based on urgency, how much I want them, price. Then each month, I can just buy the top N things that fit in my discretionary spending budget.

I wouldn’t do this for everything. Most of the time, I would rather have a dedicated “eating out” budget without deciding exactly which restaurants I’ll go to or which dishes I’ll order a month in advance. Part of the joy of eating out is in the spontaneity and other people sometimes making the decision. The exception to this case is very fancy, expensive meals. That feels like something to be planned in advance (usually they require reservations anyway).

I’m already very excited to use my new spreadsheet budget. I think it’s likely that I will create dedicated sheets to budget vacations (and extend it in many other ways that I have yet to think of)! Like buying a large world map for my wall, this is something I should have done long ago, but I’m glad I did it!