What is the best budgeting app recommended by folks? Or is plain excel the way to go? Would like some secure and free(or low cost). Thank you!

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I like Monarch. It’s $50 for the first year.
It’s very good at tracking your spending automatically, linking to multiple accounts.
It’s worth spending some money or investing time in excel. Free products care for more about selling you something, than delivering a good product.

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Far better in my experience. Not even close

I went to Personal Capital after Mint. It frequently has connection issues, and just isn’t good

Monarch isn’t perfect, but they use a few different data aggregators to pull data, and seem to take connection issues more seriously.
They also have a larger amount of useful budgeting metrics, and other features.
Also they don’t try to sell you anything, so everything on the dashboard is useful.
I’m not saying it’s perfect; and there are other options, but it’s easily better than personal capital

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I use excel, download my monthly bank/credit card statements, and import the data into a detailed expenses sheet.
I then use pivot tables for dashboards on monthly spend by category.

Im on Office 2019 which was the final version prior to M365 subscription model so it is essentially free in perpetuity.
You may want to consider Google Sheets or Libre Office if totally free is your goal.

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For Wells Fargo the transaction has like the vendor name and then a schema of characters (alphanumeric) after that changes per transaction. So I was attempting to do a fuzzy match but it wasn’t that clean.

I bet apps have a more sophisticated repo. Thanks!

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I just use empower personal capital free to see all my accounts in one spot. Good enough for tracking net worth and growth - just never been crazy for a hardcore budget to tell me I spent 100 over on bars than I “allocated” this month lol.

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I use quicken Simplify. Got it on a Black Friday special for like $35 for the year.

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Also a fan of Monarch.

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Another vote for Monarch

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If you're really serious about your finances, building out your model in Excel will stand you in good stead for the long term.

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I've been using YNAB for over a decade. Great to have precision on where your money is going and how much you actually have available.

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I have a dashboard setup in excel. It’s really intuitive and I had fun building something for personal use for once lol.

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From Wells Fargo how are you able to get merchant information or categories as fields?

Excel works well for me. Free and easy to build around for my needs.

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From Wells Fargo or chase how do you get more detailed data?

I use YNAB, You Need a Budget. It lets me assign my dollars a job before they are spent and lets me set goals for my money. Very useful to get an overview of my spending and savings. You can link to your bank accounts, credit cards, etc. and download transactions making it easy to reconcile checking and credit card accounts.

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Make your own using Claude code

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I have used RocketMoney recently I think it’s $6 / month

Monarch

I use an app called Copilot (not Microsoft). ~$100 per year

Monarch.

I just reached 30 years of data (every single transaction in every account) in Quicken so I stay there and it works. I’m probably a dinosaur.

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