Your First Budget
When you create your account, your first budget will automatically be created for you for the current month.
What is a Budget?
A budget in Budget Warden is monthly. This is not configurable as we aim to provide a simple and streamlined experience, where simplifying your financial life with best practices is encouraged, not drilling down in large lists of options.
Spending Categories
Your budget has custom categories - which you determine in four large buckets:
- Income
- Expenses
- Debt
- Savings
In each one of these your first budget already has categories with Planned and Actual amounts. These are our starter categories. They include a best-practices budget with the average U.S. income and expenses, so that you don’t start from scratch.
Budgets follow the envelope methodology, where each of the categories has a Planned amount - the ammount you intend to spend in this category for the month. Setting the categories and their planned amount is all you need to do to setup your budget for the month.
The Actual amount differs per category type. It is:
- Received for income
- Spend for expenses
- Paid for debt
- Saved for savings
You don’t manually update the actual amount. It automatically updates when you add transactions, with the “New Transaction” button.
Transactions
A transaction is how you record any movement of money into or out of your budget. You are encouraged to record every single movement of your money in order to track efficiently - using the mobile app for this is great, just record your transactions immediately after you make them, to avoid forgetting about them.
For example, when you receive your salary, add a transaction for the received income in the “Salary” category.
When you shop in the grocery store, add a transaction in the “Food” category and so on.
When you record every movement like this, you get a categorized overview of your expenses and can always check how you’re doing with the actual spendings per category vs. what you planned.
