Lunch Money: Your finances' best friend
A series of posts about Lunch Money, my new favorite budgeting and finance tool.
I've always been interested in tools and processes to help me keep on top of my finances. It seems that getting a tool that's flexible enough to accommodate my budgeting style is difficult. I enjoy the idea behind "zero-based" budgeting1, but it’s a little too optimistic for my reality. When I overspend on groceries, I don't want to spend 30 minutes reorganizing my entire budget. Therefore, a tool with the power to define my budget, and the flexibility to get out of my way, is paramount.
Enter Lunch Money.
Before I begin, I just want to point out that I’m not paid for this. I’m just passionate about great tools that solve problems well. Lunch Money is exactly that.
Calling Lunch Money a “budgeting” software is like calling a Tesla, a “car”. While technically not wrong, there’s quite a bit more to it. It has features such as:
Automatic Rules: Categorize, tag, or group transactions based on pre-defined rules.
Auto-Importing: You can login to your bank via Plaid in order to automatically sync your transactions! Yay, no more CSV files!
Charts: Build charts utilizing your financial data to make better decisions.
So much more. Seriously check out these features!
What I want to do is take a quick look at the questions I wanted to ask of my finances, and how Lunch Money helped me answers those questions!
Am I generally saving or losing money over X time frame?
Questions like this frequently bounced around in my mind. If you’re anything like I was, you just have “a feel” for how much money you can spend and at the end of the month your eyes blur over a bit as you try to calculate if you actually saved any money or if you lost money.
I use Lunch Money to do a detailed analysis across not only my budget (i.e. What am I saying I will spend?) but all the actual money that comes and goes. (i.e. What did I actually spend?)
This image shows that for the last six months, we had a total net gain of just over $2k.
These questions are a great indicator of the financial direction you’re headed. And these are the broadest and most-general of questions we could ask. Notice the answer is built into Lunch Money! I didn’t even have to configure a report.
How much do I need to set aside for this month?
Another question that used to bother me a lot. Between utilities, rent (now mortage), groceries, and the ever-important Spotify subscription—how could I forecast what the coming month would bring? Well Lunch Money has an answer for this as well: The BUDGET page:
Immediately after setting your budget you get a little widget that will show you what your projected income and expenses will be. This is great for understanding how much wiggle room you have this month! This is updated in real-time so if you want to see how an extra date night, or perhaps a new Apple Watch would impact your budget—simply make those changes to your budget and see where the new result leaves you.
I’m hungry… Can I go out to eat?
How many times have you driven past Chick-fil-a just to swing a quick U-turn, and prepare yourself to consume The Lord’s Bird, with 0 actual clue if you can afford it? It’s okay. We all do it.
Well here’s the thing—Lunch Money can’t answer that question directly, unless you open a web browser real quick and check your budget. But I envision a world where I can simply say, “Hey Siri, can I eat out?” and Siri checks my budget and breaks the news to me (hopefully gently).
Lunch Money does provide an open developer API to ask all sorts of clever questions and get the answers for yourself. (Hint hint. Incoming project that I will be diving into on this blog).
This post is already pretty long. This is the first in a series of posts I’m going to do about Lunch Money. I’ve been thinking about doing other spin-off posts about my automation workflows and other tooling I use to organize my thoughts and my life. If that sounds interesting, sound off! I’d love to hear your thoughts!
This link breaks down the concept behind zero-based budgeting: https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/finance/zero-based-budgeting-explained