Budgeting with MoneyTracker helps you #GetMoneyFit
Keep your budget in excellent shape with Nedbank’s free personal finance tool.
When you’re trying to #GetMoneyFit, not tracking your income and your spending with a budget has the same effect on your financial profile as a steady diet of junk food has on your physical profile. There’s no shame in admitting that we all give in to impulse buys – things we want but don’t need – now and again. It gives us a temporary mood lift – but then we have to deal with the consequences.
Consistency, grit, and vision are essential when you’re getting your finances into shape, and creating a budget (and then sticking to it) helps you align all 3. Drawing up your budget doesn’t have to be complicated, thanks to the free MoneyTracker tool from Nedbank.
Your go-to budgeting app
Financial planning is a team sport, and success is more likely if you rely on the support of expert financial advisers and smart tools. Think of MoneyTracker as an assistant coach who is available 24/7. Its user-friendly design means you don’t need to know anything about budgets or accounting to get started. Once you’ve linked your accounts, you can import transactions and allocate them to a category – for example, ‘entertainment’ – and set a spending limit for that category.
All you need to do after that is track your monthly spending and ensure you’re sticking to your budget. You won’t have to deal with spreadsheets filled with numbers – MoneyTracker uses intuitive design and graphics, so it’s easy to see how you’re doing in real time.
One of the most useful features is being able to set MoneyTracker to allocate expenses to budget items automatically
As time goes by, it will get better at recognising transactions and allocating them to the correct budget categories. It will even send you notifications to warn you if you’re getting close to your preset budget limit for the month.
And if you want to track your spending in greater detail, you can do so by creating up to 8 dashboards that each track specific expenses. For example, you can track your groceries and household essentials to make sure you don’t overspend on weekly shopping. Or you could track how much your passions (like sport, games, arts or entertainment) cost you every month.
Why budgeting is important
Creating and sticking to a monthly budget has both financial and psychological benefits. The better you’re able to manage your money, the more secure and settled you’ll feel. Whether you use MoneyTracker or a different way to set and monitor your expenses, you’ll be doing yourself a world of good.
Firstly, having a budget puts you firmly in charge of your finances. Once you have a plan, you’ll become more aware of what things cost and how much you’re spending. If your goal is to cut your expenses, just being aware of where your money goes will help you stay on track for a winning result.
By using MoneyTracker to manage your monthly expenses and track your spending, you’ll start to pick up problem areas where you may be overspending or under-budgeting. We all want to spend as little as possible on transport, but when petrol prices go up, we simply have to adjust. So, make sure your budget is realistic and revisited often, so that your assumptions remain accurate.
Most importantly, the budgeting process helps you to build better money habits and #GetMoneyFit. You’ll become less reliant on debt, and you’ll improve how you manage and use credit.
Side hustle saviour
Perhaps MoneyTracker’s best feature is its ability to function as a mini accounting app. Apart from keeping your personal budget in championship shape, you can set up and track income and expenses from a side hustle or alternative forms of income, like renting out a room or cottage.
Not only can you use one of the dashboards to name and track all these transactions, but you’re also able to generate and track invoices to ensure you get paid, just like you would with a top-end accounting package.
Separating your business and personal finances makes sense on so many levels and lowers the risk of your personal affairs being affected if your business suffers a financial loss.
How to get MoneyTracker
You can access MoneyTracker on the Nedbank Money app or Online Banking.
On the Money app, log in and tap More in the bottom navigation pane. Select MoneyTracker, then create a personal, business or side-hustle dashboard. Select the accounts you would like to track. Give your dashboard a name and start categorising your spend to set up a budget.
If you use Online Banking, log in and click on MoneyTracker in the top navigation menu. Follow the same set-up steps and put yourself on track, financially, to achieve your personal best.
