Budgy is a simple application for keeping track of personal or family wealth and projects, so you can plan future expenses, avoid surprises, and not end up bankrupt.
Budgy is based on accounts and projects:
- accounts are the places where you keep your money, the money you actually have,
- projects are the expenses you expect to make.
Accounts can be all sorts of things: a bank account, cash under the mattress, investments, stocks… anything. From time to time you will need to record the value of each of your accounts, and the program will tell you how wealthy you are.
Then, as mentioned, there are projects that can be of different types; each type defines how the project’s value changes over time:
- Manual: you enter the value yourself
- Monthly: you define the monthly amount to set aside for the project, and Budgy increases its value automatically every month by that amount
- Monthly with limit: it works like Monthly, but once the limit is reached, Budgy stops
- Annual loop: in each month of the year the project has a value, which repeats year after year
- Annual reserve: the project must be able to cover expenses defined for certain months of the year, and Budgy calculates the monthly savings needed to support them
I think a few examples will make everything clearer:
- You want to buy a bicycle: fine, “Bicycle” becomes a “Monthly with limit” project. You just set the bicycle’s price as the limit and a monthly savings amount that will let you buy it in, say, one year.
- You want to save some money: in this case too, Budgy helps with the “Monthly” project type.
- You have recurring expenses, for example insurance: 500 euros in January, 1000 in March, 700 in October. “Annual reserve” is the right type, because Budgy calculates a constant monthly savings amount and a fund that lets you always have the necessary money set aside.