Nancy Zimmerman: a canadian money coach (not a financial planner!)

One of the up-and-coming nifty tools for managing your money is PennyMinder – and it’s by a Canadian developer, hooray!  You can follow Vince on twitter @pennyminder.   For readers who want to keep on top of your holiday spending easily, his online tool may be your answer.  I asked Vince to say pop by my  blog!

______________________________________

It’s almost that time of the year and it can be especially difficult
to stay on budget during the holidays.  One of the things my wife and
I are doing this year is tracking our holiday expenses using
Pennyminder.

A Project at ChippedIn would have worked just as well, but
since we use Pennyminder to track our day to day family expenses,
that’s where we are using to track our holiday expenses too.

There are a few different ways we could have set things up, depending
on the level of detail we wanted. For us, one big category for
everything seems to be working okay.

It’s also possible to be a bit more detailed and have holiday related
categories for things like gifts, food or decorations. You could even
go so far as to have a separate category for each gift recipient.

Once the categories are set up and shared with the other members of
the family who might be buying things for the holidays, simply add the
expenses for the holiday purchases.

Pennyminder (or Chippped.In) will do the rest by keeping track of the
total.  It’s definitely helping us to stay on budget this holiday
season.