The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
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I really liked using You Need A Budget but I can't really justify the cost nowadays, anyone have recommendations on a free budgeting app (or perhaps how to go about building your own using Excel?).
GnuCash is free.
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I'd start with Excel, and if you see that you have needs beyond that, at least you will have more clear picture of what those needs are. My own experience about keeping track of the family finances for couple of decades have been:
Doing a consistent effort and keeping track of things is much more important that the tool you're using. Unless you're so rich that you have complex investments and cash flows that can't be properly managed with a simple spreadsheet, then you'd probably just hire a professional. Actually, spending too much time on finding the exactly right tool might distract you from actually doing the budget. Budget on a napkin is better than a perfect tool and no budget.
For all my needs over the years, with investments, stock options, house purchases and sales, education expenses, etc. - Excel have proven enough. I mean, it could be that a better too could do better, but I never felt like I can't keep my budget under control anymore because spreadsheets are the limiting factor.
That said, online aggregator tools - like Mint, for example - allow you to keep a synchronized picture of your current accounts, and that's helpful. The downside is that most of these tools are owned by big corps now (like Intuit) and you are essentially allow them to know all your financial transactions. If that worries you, unfortunately I know of no tool that is free, independent and has smooth interface to a myriad of financial institutions around. I suspect it doesn't exist, because keeping track of all that wild variety with no standards and nobody caring about unified automatable client interfaces is a lot of expensive legwork, which must be paid for.
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