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My Money guides
Each guide answers one question: concrete steps, when it applies, its limits, and the step where My Money can help.
- Can’t stick with tracking your spending? Make every entry shorterPeople rarely give up on tracking because they’re lazy. Usually each entry takes too many taps, a few missed days feel impossible to catch up on, and the numbers only tell you something at the end of the month. Fix those three things and tracking gets much easier to keep up.
- How much can I spend today? Turn a monthly budget into a daily allowanceDaily allowance = the money you can spend freely this month ÷ the number of days. “Money you can spend freely” is take-home pay minus fixed bills and what you plan to save. After that, you only need two rules: what happens to money you don’t spend, and what happens when you overspend.
- Budgeting without linking your bank: what you gain and what you give upLinking your bank saves typing, but it gives another service access to your transactions and shows spending after it has happened. Without it, you log each purchase yourself. Here is what each choice costs, a checklist for judging any budgeting app’s data handling, and how to make manual logging stick.
- How to log expenses on iPhone with Back Tap: double-tap after you payBack Tap is an iPhone accessibility setting that runs an action when you double- or triple-tap the back of the phone, and that action can be a shortcut. Pair it with My Money’s screenshot shortcut and the payment screen you’re looking at becomes a draft entry to check and save. Setup takes a few minutes, once.
- Out of money before payday? Try one daily number instead of a monthly budgetMoney rarely runs out on the 25th. It goes on the 3rd, the 9th and the 14th, a little at a time, and you find out at the end. A daily number moves that moment to the day you spend. Here is the arithmetic, a week worked through with illustrative numbers, and the limits of the approach.
- Budgeting app too complicated? Try one numberThe simplest budget that still works is one number: what you can spend this month, divided by 30, minus what you’ve spent today. Leave categories, envelopes and reports for later, and add each one only when it answers a question you actually have.
- How to choose a budgeting app: 12 questionsCheck four things on the App Store listing before you install (the price, “In-App Purchases”, App Privacy and Compatibility), then ask how the app gets your transactions, where it keeps them and how you’d leave. The 12 questions below cover all of it, with how My Money answers each, including where it isn’t a fit.
- Budget app keeps losing your bank connection?Use the reconnect option inside the app first, then sign in to your bank directly. A changed password, an out-of-date phone number for security codes, a sharing setting at the bank or an outage is the usual cause. While the link is down, log purchases by hand for a week so your budget stays current.
- Stop impulse buying with a cooling-off listPut a short wait between wanting something and paying for it. Write the item down, pick 1, 7 or 30 days, and decide again when the wait is over. If you still want it then, buy it on purpose; if not, you’ve kept the money.