I Use Budget

Across the spectrum of personal finance blogs, people use a wide variety of budgeting methods. There are Luddites amongst us who use actual, physical envelopes with actual, physical cash inside, and there are techies who have Quicken, Money or Mvelopes synched up to their bank accounts and use Yodlee and Wesabe in addition. Personally, I use a funny little combination of the two: Budget, by Snowmint Creative Solutions. Much like Mvelopes, Budget creates a high-tech mockup of the old-fashioned envelope system, earmarking funds from each pay source into different "envelopes" so that I can always see what I have available for a particular category of expenses. Budget doesn't synch with your accounts (or, rather, it allegedly does, but I haven't been able to make it work), which I actually kind of like, because it allows me to round my spending up to create a buffer in my checking account, but it's a convenience downside (you have to enter your own transactions). I really love Budget--it's not too much software for me, and it's a lightweight, Mac-designed program that does exactly what I need it to--show me how much money I can spend and allow me to "save" without opening a zillion ING subaccounts. All in all, it's a great little program for a visually-oriented Mac user whose finances aren't too complicated and who likes to create "bank errors" in his or her own favor.