Don’t get me wrong. The folks who created Wesabe are a very intelligent bunch but when I read a recent post on their blog, “Budgeting is hard. Don’t bother!” I have to wonder how much confidence they have in the intelligence of their user base. To be fair, the folks over at Wesabe are attempting to leverage what we believe is a flawed perception to attract new users and there is nothing wrong with that, EXCEPT that part about the “flawed perception.”
We certainly hope there is a flawed perception about budgeting being hard because we’ve built a business on the premise that budgeting need not be hard! In fact, if you give BudgetSketch a try we think you’ll find that budgeting is quite easy, almost trivial, and believe me, if I can create a budget, anyone can!
So, why do those bright folks over at Wesabe think that budgeting is hard? We believe they’re misinterpreting what budgeting is. In fact, this is the chief obstacle we’ve faced introducing our product to the general public. Most folks, even the learned ones, seem to confuse budgeting with accounting. We’ll give you the fact that accounting can be hard but budgeting? Really?!
To quote the blog post and their definition of budgeting, “you’re being asked to give a precise, to-the-penny guess for your lunch spending for each of the next 12 months”. Well, if you think budgeting is what the folks at Wasabe call budgeting, then have we got good news for you! Budgeting is about intent, not fact. Your budget should reflect what you intend to spend. Your budget will never tell you exactly what you are going to spend on bubble gum 12 months from now. Your checkbook will tell you what you actually spent. How hard is that?
The Wesabe post was meant to trumpet improvements to their features called “spending targets”, which is about as close as Wesabe comes to actual budgeting. I suppose you could create a budget within Wesabe so long as all your spending, every month, fell into one spending target or another but as we all know, budgets change from one month to the next and a target isn’t something you’ll want to move too much.
Using BudgetSketch you can create and maintain a detailed, monthly spending plan (AKA “a budget”) in ten minutes, and BudgetSketch will soon be introducing a goals system that will permit you to assign surplus income to specific financial goals, such as “Buy a new washer & dryer” or “Save for the Emergency Fund”. Hey, don’t take our word for it. Try BudgetSketch and prove to yourself just how easy budgeting can be.
