One of the best ways to reel-in your spending, believe it or not, is to set yourself up with a viable working budget. Often easier said than done as it does take a significant amount of detailed work to sit down and plow through all of the necessary details, it is great to know that there is a free resource on the web to help make this task not only easier, but fun as well. By offering a free online tool to anyone willing to signup for an account by creating an account name and password, and providing a valid email address, one can quickly and easily be on their way towards having a standing budget in place very quickly. This intuitively designed software program is explained in an 8 ½ minute video that is available at Clear Checkbook’s website and is easily accessed via their tour page.

With ClearCheckbook’s Budget Calculator, one can build, step-by-step, a comprehensive budget including all of the following:

•    Bill Tracker
•    Budget Calculator
•    Reminders / Recurring Transactions
•    Spending Reports
•    Import Transactions
•    Transaction Register
•    More Financial Tools

Just look at what is being offered to you for free! The ability to track bills by established categories, running totals of charges against specific budget items, and spending limits set for budget categories that will display the amount spent to date and the percentage of the allocated budget used – all color coded in green, yellow, and red. And it doesn’t stop there. It also provides you with reminders for recurring transactions so you don’t make payments late and face onerous late fees or resulting over limit fees on those accounts. You can import transactions from CSV, OFX, QFX and QIF files so you don’t have to manually add your old transactions. With the ability to print reports and a wide variety of charts and graphs, one can really get in charge of how they allocate their hard earned money going forward.

The program is setup with all of the major categories that one should need to get started as follows:

•    Eating Out
•    Groceries
•    Housing
•    Rent/Mortgage
•    Utilities
•    Living Expenses
•    Clothing
•    Entertainment
•    Travel
•    Transportation
•    Car Insurance
•    Car Payment
•    Gas
•    Maintenance
•    Miscellaneous

With the ability to add, edit, and delete categories very easily, one can quickly customize the program to meet their personal budget requirements. Simply identify the account or category you want to set a budget for, enter the amount of the monthly budget, what day you would like it to reset on, whether or not you want it to rollover and you’re done!

One can easily go back and review their budget versus spending history and check the under limit and over limit amounts to help determine if budget limits need to be altered for certain categories or if one just needs to reign in spending in a certain area. Easily customizable with the ability to add more specific categories, edit existing ones, or delete those categories that no longer apply (finished with that boat payment?), there is no way that you can beat the price…free!