Hi there, my name is Miguel. I am the creator of spenditures.
I just wanted to take some time to quickly explain why I created this tool and hope that as you give it a try that find it as useful as I do.
I always had a hard time working out exactly how much money we had left to spend, juggling multiple credit cards, projecting into the future when the statements were due. I tried using all the other budgeting apps out there and didn’t quite find anything that did what I wanted it to do.
They were either too manual, where you are required to open the app and type in each purchase, which was never going to be sustainable of us, or in the case of those tools that automatically pulled transactions from our bank account to help you to budget your spending, these were too complicated. They were a swiss army knife of functionality, all of which were inadequate to really give me a clear overview of me income and expenses and allow me to plan and forecast my finances into the future. During the 2020 lockdown, I found myself with more time to finally decided address this issue we were having.
You see, for us, as a family who spends on credit card and then pays the credit card statement balance when it’s due. We had this problem where you are spending on something today, but you would only pay for it from your salary in 1 – 2 months in the future. So all these other budgeting apps assume your spending today is applicable to your income today, which in our case it’s not.
Let’s us look at the example below to illustrate what I mean
So in this example, let’s say during the month of January I spend £500 on my credit card, then on 5th February I will get a credit card statement from the bank saying £500 is due to be paid on 1st March. So when I get paid my salary at the end of February. I know that £500 needs to come out of that salary to pay for the credit card spending I did back in January. All the while the spending I am currently doing on the credit card in February will be due to be paid on 1st April.
So you can see that something that I purchased on 5th January would only be paid for from my salary on 1st March, which is 2 months in the future; and things only get more complicated as you have multiple credit cards from different banks who have different credit card statement cycles.
So the budgeting tools I found on the market didn’t cater for this issue.
So that’s why I created spenditures, to help me with budgeting our credit card purchases, so that we know exactly where we stand with my (and my partners) spending, so I could ensure that I am always prepared to pay the credit card statement balance when it’s due.
My plan for spenditures is to have it freely available for anyone to use, in order get feedback and improve it. And if people are getting real value out of it, as I am, then I will start charging a small fee – not to the users who have already registered who provided feedback and helped me to improve spenditures – but only to new users who register from then on out. This fee will need to be charged so that we can maintain the upkeep of spenditures.
So that’s it. I will continue to post here my thoughts on budgeting and hopefully you find it valuable and stick around and let me know your thoughts.
Until next time, have a great day.