The Best Quicken Alternative (Actual Budget Deep Dive)

Hello and welcome to Tech Talk. I'm

Graeme Hughes. We've just come out of a month where many people will have spent more money than they were planning on, and some might have even spent more money than they really should have. And

they'll be turning to budgeting and personal finance software to help get them back on track. Now, the gorilla in the room in that space has always been Quicken. Quicken is a giant. It's been

Quicken. Quicken is a giant. It's been

around forever. But if you're a longtime Quickn user like I am, you'll note that Quickn has gotten more automated, more bloated, and it's only available on a subscription basis. So, if that doesn't

subscription basis. So, if that doesn't really work for you, what are your alternatives? Well, today on Tech Talk,

alternatives? Well, today on Tech Talk, we're going to be looking at a piece of software called Actual Budget. Now,

Actual Budget is free and open source, and it's available for Linux and Windows and Apple products as well. And the

question we're going to answer is, is actual budget a potential quick and killer or is it just another piece of free software that's worth exactly what you paid for it? That's coming up right

now right here on Tech Talk.

So, what then really is Actual Budget all about? Well, as mentioned, it is

all about? Well, as mentioned, it is free and open- source software. It

doesn't cost anything, and it's all about budgeting your finances and as well tracking your spending. For me, I'm not a huge budgeting fan. I much prefer tracking my expenses. At the end of every month, I look at what I've spent.

I look at where I've over spent, where I can do better next month. Now, what I like about actual budget for my purposes is after I've done that for just one month, I can very quickly make a budget that applies to future months. And if I

do decide I want to compare what I'm spending in the month as I go along against a budget, that's very, very simple to do and it doesn't take much time. So, it's pretty cool software. In

time. So, it's pretty cool software. In

my use of this, and I've been using it now for a couple months, what I really like is it's like Quicken, but it's really stripped down. It doesn't have a whole lot of bloat to it. It runs

really, really fast. It's really, really simple to use. If something goes wrong, it's really simple to see where the mistake was made cuz you're probably the one that made it. The thing I find about Quicken is too often it's doing stuff

automatically behind the scenes, and lately I found it's been making errors.

I've put uh entries in only to switch to a different screen or a different account, and that entry either disappears or changes. I've also found problems where when I'm downloading transactions for my bank, it will

duplicate transactions that are already in my register. So, as Quickn has gotten smarted, smarter, has gotten more featurerich, is trying to do more things for you. I'm also finding there's more

for you. I'm also finding there's more problems. And lately, my use of Quickn has been getting slower and slower and slower. It takes longer to get my books

slower. It takes longer to get my books up to date than it ever used to. So, in

trying out actual budget, what I was really looking forward to is seeing, look, does this kind of strip out all the unnecessary stuff from Quickn and help me get the job done faster. That's

what I was keen to to find out. And I'm

going to show you what it works like here in just a couple of minutes. So,

having said all that, let's go right into it. We're going to install Actual

into it. We're going to install Actual Budget on Linux Mint to show you how that works. It is available as a flat

that works. It is available as a flat pack in Linux. So, that's how we're going to do it. And then we're going to get into the software. I'm going to show you exactly what it looks like. I'm

going to give you the basics of how to set up accounts, set up spending categories, and look at your reporting.

This isn't meant to be a fullfeatured video where I show you every single thing there is to know about actual budget, but it'll give you enough to decide whether or not you want the software, how the software works, you

can get started with it, and then learn the more advanced stuff as you go along.

So, that's coming up right now.

Okay, so let's go ahead and start by installing actual budget. And again,

we're doing it on my PC that's running uh Linux Mint. So, we're just going to go into the Linux Mint software manager.

And what we're going to do is just search for actual budget. And as you see, it comes right up. So, we're going to click here. It is a flat pack, so installing this is dead simple. We're

just going to hit the install button.

And it's letting us know the different software it's going to be installed along with it. We'll hit continue, and it's going to go about installing it.

This is not an enormous program. It

doesn't take long to install and it does not take much in the way of computer resources to run. You should be able to run uh this piece of software even on a very old computer with modest resources.

So, we're just going to wait for that to install.

Okay. So, now we've got actual budget installed. We're going to now launch the

installed. We're going to now launch the application and we're just going to minimize this.

We're going to maximize actual budget.

So now this screen when you first see it, you might seem like, "Oh, this is complicated already. I got to set up a

complicated already. I got to set up a server. What are you talking about?"

server. What are you talking about?"

Setting up a server is only if you want to share your data between multiple devices or across the internet. You have

that option. You don't have to though.

As I mentioned, you can set it up just as a local application with all your data held locally. And you'll notice down here in small small print, it says don't use a server. So to set this up locally, which is what we're going to do

today because it's the simplest way to do it, I'm just going to click on don't use a server. Now, if you do want to share your data across applications or across the internet, the instructions

for setting it up on a server are all on the website. If we look here at the

the website. If we look here at the actual open-source software website, this tab that says documents has all the instructions for doing it. How to use

actual budget, how to set it up, how to set it up on a server. It's not that complicated. So for us though, we're

complicated. So for us though, we're just going to use it local and we're going to hit start fresh. Now you'll

note it says import my budget. If you've

been using Quicken, you can import your Quickn data. Uh I have tried that. It

Quickn data. Uh I have tried that. It

does take a little bit of finagling to get all your data in and get it working right. You have to line up your various

right. You have to line up your various budgeting categories. You have to make

budgeting categories. You have to make sure your balances are correct, etc. So yes, you can import all your Quickn data. What I chose to do, and what I

data. What I chose to do, and what I think is probably easier for most people, my Quickn subscription runs out on December 31st or ran out on December

31st. So, what I did was for the month

31st. So, what I did was for the month of December 2025, I put all my financial data in both Quicken and Actual Budget.

So, I have a one-mon overlap. I'm going

to close Quicken off at the end of 2025, start using actual budget in 2026. So,

you can do it either way. You can import your data from Quicken and make all the adjustments that you need to make or you can just decide to start a new set of books fresh with actual budget. The

choice is up to you. So for us, we're just going to start fresh as though we have no data to bring in. And you can see this is not the world's fastest computer. This is a Ryzen 54500,

computer. This is a Ryzen 54500, but this thing runs really quickly. The

install is only like I think uh 1.4 GB or something like that. It's not big. So

this runs really quick. Now when we come to this page the first thing it wants us to do is to start adding accounts. So

just like in Quickn you have to put in all your bank accounts etc. Now there is an interesting kind of quirk with actual budget and that quirk is that they have

what's called uh onbudget and off-budget accounts. So an offbudget account is an

accounts. So an offbudget account is an account that shows up in your net worth but does not show up as a transfer when you move money to it. So, if you have a checking and savings account, those are

both onbudget. When you transfer money

both onbudget. When you transfer money between the two, there's no expense and there's no income earned from that. It's

just a transfer. If you have an off-budget account, when you transfer money to it, that transfer counts as an expense. Where I found this helpful is I

expense. Where I found this helpful is I have a separate account for my property tax and car insurance because those are big expenses that I only pay once a year. So, my account where I save all my

year. So, my account where I save all my money for my property tax and car insurance is an off-budget account.

every month or every week, sorry, I put $150 into those accounts and it counts as a property tax insurance expense. So, what that allows

insurance expense. So, what that allows me to do instead of having, you know, saving up all this money in account and then paying my property tax bill, which is like $4,000, and it shows as a $4,000

expense in one month, which is hard to budget for. Now, all my $150 a week

budget for. Now, all my $150 a week contributions count as that expense. and

when I pay it out in June, that big lump sum, that doesn't count because it's coming from an off-budget account. So, I

hope that makes sense. So, let's start setting up some accounts. We're going to go here first. We're going to go with uh we're not going to set up bank sync. So,

we're going to just create a local account.

So, we're going to call this uh call it bank one checking.

And I'm going to start off with a balance. Let's just make this easy.

balance. Let's just make this easy.

Let's say we got $1,000 in that account.

Okay. And then we're going to add another account.

We're call this bank two.

Actually, no. We're going to call this bank one savings.

And my typing is terrible. You have to forgive me for that. We're going to say it's got a balance of 5,000.

I'm going to add a credit card account.

We're going to start that off with a balance of zero.

And now I'm going to add a local account that is an off-budget account. So I'm going to mirror my

account. So I'm going to mirror my property tax and insurance savings account. So we're going to tick this box

account. So we're going to tick this box that says offbudget. And as you note, it says this can't be changed later. You

can't change an off-budget account to onbudget and vice versa. If you want to make a change, you basically got to delete the account and start over. So

it's important that you get your offbudget accounts right when you set this up. So, what I'm going to do is I'm

this up. So, what I'm going to do is I'm going to call this my insurance slashpropy tax account

and I'm going to say it's got a balance of 500.

So, there we go. So, we basically got four accounts set up. We got two bank accounts, a credit card account, and an offbudget savings account that I'm using for a special purpose. Now, one thing I

do like to do on here, you've got budget, reports, and schedules here in the left bar. Down below, when you expand more, there's the settings tab.

And there's not a whole lot in here.

It's pretty straightforward. I prefer to have my dates uh go in descending order.

So, year, month, day. I prefer the first day of the week to be Monday.

Uh and this one here, I think, is the one that's most important. this box

here. You note it says that you have the chance or they have the opportunity of setting this up to be either envelope budgeting, which is recommended, or tracking budgeting, one or the other.

So, I'm going to switch to tracking budgeting because what tracking budgeting does, it just says, "Hey, you're going to track your expenses as they occur. You're going to base your

they occur. You're going to base your budget on what you generally tend to expend each month." I find that a lot simpler. It's what I'm used to. It's the

simpler. It's what I'm used to. It's the

way Quicken runs. So, you do have to make your decision. Do you want envelope budgeting or tracking budgeting? I think

for most people, you know, if you're fairly successful at running your family finances, tracking budgeting is going to be the way to go. So, before I do anything, that's what I like to do. I

like to switch it to tracking budgeting.

The next thing you're going to want to do before you do anything else is you're going to want to go to budget because under budget is where you set up your spending categories. Now, if you're used

spending categories. Now, if you're used to quicken, you're going to be used to having categories where you have a main category and then you have subcategories underneath.

actual budget doesn't really allow subcategories. What they have is just

subcategories. What they have is just categories and then groups of categories. So you can kind of make the

categories. So you can kind of make the groups your main category and then have your subcategories after that. But it

does work a little bit different. So

here what we're going to do, I'm just going to add some expenses uh expense categories just to help us with some data entry here. You can see they've already given me some base ones. I've

got food, I've got general expenses, I've got bills, I've got flexible bills.

The difference between those two, of course, bills are things you have to pay every month, like your rent and your heat. Flexible bills are things that are

heat. Flexible bills are things that are optional, maybe like your cell phone plan. Uh, I'm not really a huge fan of

plan. Uh, I'm not really a huge fan of that. So, you can always get rid of

that. So, you can always get rid of categories you're not going to use. What

I do is I just rightclick on the category, it opens up this window, you hit delete, boom, it's gone. No problem.

Now, what we're going to add for myself, let's add a couple of expenses that kind of make sense. Let's do auto expenses.

is I'm going to make these very very general because I'm not showing you here how to manage your finances. I just want to give you an idea of how the software works. Going to go restaurants.

works. Going to go restaurants.

Let's add hobbies.

Let's add entertainment.

Under investments, I'm going to add a couple as well because there's a few that I like. Savings. If you've got an offbudget account where it's an investment account like your retirement

savings, every time you put money into it, it's going to be tracked as a savings expense. Um, but there's things

savings expense. Um, but there's things that happen within an investment account that you may want to track as well. For

instance, you might earn interest.

Oh, but actually, sorry, this should be under income.

So, under income, we're going to add interest.

We're going to add dividends.

We're going to add capital gains.

And then under investment expenses, we're going to add capital losses.

And I'll show you why I'm I'm adding these particular categories. Because one

thing that actual budget does not do that quicken does do is it will not download market data on your investments. So, if you have an

investments. So, if you have an investment account where you've got stocks, you got bonds, you got mutual funds, etc., it's not going to download market data and update the prices automatically for you. So, you do have

to do some manual tracking. But, as we go through this, I'm going to show you kind of the quickest way to do manual tracking of an investment account. So,

in order to do that, we should probably go ahead and set up an investment account. Now, we're not going to set

account. Now, we're not going to set this investment account up as offbook.

We're going to set it up as on book. Uh,

and that's so I can just show you the simplified way of keeping track of the value of an investment account over time when you're not downloading the market data like Quicken does. So, let's do it.

Let's add an investment account. We're

going to go add account. Create local

account. We're just going to call it investment account.

And let's say the starting balance is going to be 10,000.

And we're going to hit create. So, there

you go. We've got a brand new investment account with a starting balance of 10,000. Just like the other ones, we're

10,000. Just like the other ones, we're going to backdate that starting balance to November 1st. So, there we go. Now,

we've got all of our accounts set up. Uh

we've got some categories in our budget that we've set up. Let's take a look at how we put expenses in. So, we're going to start with our checking account. Now,

November 1st, we had $1,000 balance. All

we have to do to add a transaction is put add new. And I'm going to date this for November 4. And I'm going to say we went to Chevron

and we got gas for the car.

And we're going to categorize that as an auto expense and we spent $40.

Uh we're going to do another transaction. This time November 6. We're

transaction. This time November 6. We're

going to say we went to Safeway.

Oops.

and we're going to categorize that as food and we're going to say it was $110.

Now you can see how quickly this is taking these transactions. It's a very very lightweight application. It doesn't

take a whole lot to get things done. So

that is one way to put your transactions in. It's just manually adding things as

in. It's just manually adding things as you go along. Now like quicken actual budget also has the ability to download transactions from your financial

institution. Now in Quicken what often

institution. Now in Quicken what often happens is you download the transactions in QFX file format. QFX is what actual budget uses as well. So you don't have to change how you do it. The one

difference is in Quickn once you download that file you usually just double click click it. Quicken memorizes

what account that file belongs to. So

you don't really have to do anything else. actual budget is a little bit

else. actual budget is a little bit different. So if I'm here in my checking

different. So if I'm here in my checking account, what I have to do is I have to download those transactions from my bank. And then in actual budget, I go to

bank. And then in actual budget, I go to import downloads. I go to the downloaded file.

downloads. I go to the downloaded file.

And I've already got these from my own bank.

And then I have to make sure I download the appropriate file. Now you can see I've got a number of bank transactions that I've downloaded for different accounts. The first one was joint

accounts. The first one was joint checking QFX file. So I'm in the joint checking account. I'm importing to joint

checking account. I'm importing to joint checking. So I want to download that

checking. So I want to download that file and bring the transactions in. When

you've double cllicked on the file, this is the window that comes up. And what

it's saying is, hey, look, we're going to bring in all of these different transactions that we downloaded from the bank. And you've got an option to go

bank. And you've got an option to go ahead and either have those transactions come in, or you can simply click the little blue plus here to remove them.

So, if I take out these top four, that means those four transactions won't be added to the register. The rest will, but we're going to put them back in.

We're going to leave that all on. I'm

just going to say import the 14 transactions that we downloaded from my bank. So, there you go. I've got all my

bank. So, there you go. I've got all my transactions in. You can see here that

transactions in. You can see here that we've got the balance showing along the side. Now, I should point out that this

side. Now, I should point out that this balance when you first open actual budget, the balance doesn't show up.

uh it actually shows like this.

So all you're going to see is transactions with the total balance currently up here in the upper left. To

turn on the running balance, you simply go to the three dots here on the far right, put show running balance, and there you go. You do have a few other options here that you can turn on and off as you see fit. These little green

check marks are basically for reconciling. So you can see everything I

reconciling. So you can see everything I downloaded from the bank is considered reconciled already. The two transactions

reconciled already. The two transactions I entered manually for the groceries and the auto fuel are not reconciled. I just

click on that and we're saying, "Yep, I'm good. All these transactions are

I'm good. All these transactions are just fine." So now what we can do, these

just fine." So now what we can do, these transactions I downloaded from the bank.

I can just go ahead and categorize these.

Uh whoops. I'm just going to run some categories here.

So here I've got a couple of transfers I'm just going to going to leave for now. I'm going to show you how to do a

now. I'm going to show you how to do a transfer.

So actually let's do the transfer now.

So you can see on the left hand side I've got my checking account. I've got

my savings account. This was a transfer that I did between two bank accounts.

Now this is handled a little bit differently here. We're not going to use

differently here. We're not going to use the category button for this. What we're

going to do is we're going to go over to the name or to the payee and we're just going to give it a click. And down here it says make transfer. So we're going to click the make transfer button and we're

going to transfer it to our savings account. We click the savings account. I

account. We click the savings account. I

always ignore this.

It's basically saying, you know, you've only got one pay like this. Do you want to delete it now that it's not going to be the pay anymore? I always just say do nothing.

So now that that transfer is done, you can see instead of having a pay, it shows an arrow to say that this amount has gone to bank one savings account and under the category, it's automatically

been categorized as a transfer. So it

doesn't go into your expenses. It's a

transfer. It's basically a neutral transaction. We're going to do the same

transaction. We're going to do the same thing here. We've got a credit card

thing here. We've got a credit card payment. Let's click on that. We're

payment. Let's click on that. We're

going to go make a transfer and we're going to go to our credit card and gonna click this off and go do nothing.

Okay, so now I've got a transfer to my credit card that says transfer. So if we go to my savings account, we can see that I had my starting balance on November 11 and now I have a transfer in

from my checking account in the amount of $61728.

I'm going to show the running balance.

It shows I had a $5,000 starting balance and I got 561728.

Ditto for my credit card. My credit card transfers in. I didn't have a starting

transfers in. I didn't have a starting balance on this. So now I'm going to be showing a credit balance in my credit card account of 3,41053.

Let's just say for the heck of it, because I don't like showing a credit balance in a credit card, let's just say on December 10 before I made that transfer,

I bought uh I went to Best Buy and I bought a bunch of stuff for 4,200.

So there you go. So on December 10, I had an expense on my credit card for 4,200. I transferred 341053 from my bank

4,200. I transferred 341053 from my bank account on December 15. Now you can see my new balance is I owe78947.

So that's basically how your transactions work for categorizing for manually entering a transaction for downloading a transaction from your bank. Uh how to turn the balances on in

bank. Uh how to turn the balances on in the accounts. Now let's look at an the

the accounts. Now let's look at an the investment account. So as I mentioned

investment account. So as I mentioned the one thing that actual budget doesn't do that quicken does do is it doesn't have an automatic system for tracking the value of your investments. You can't

just update the market data and have all your stocks and bonds and mutual funds and everything else be repriced showing the new values. Now, for me, that's not a big deal because my brokerage never

allowed me to download transactions. So,

I had to do all the dividends, all the interest, all the capital gains manually. Um, and then I had to, you

manually. Um, and then I had to, you know, update the market data. It just

was a pain because my I don't need my budgeting application to be tracking my investments. That's what I have my

investments. That's what I have my online brokerage account for. So to me it felt like a duplication because I was always having to go in and manually enter all these transactions. So this is

the way I run my investment accounts in actual budget. So for me, I don't make

actual budget. So for me, I don't make them off budget. Actual budget

recommends that you do, but again, this is kind of one of those things you can do it whatever way works for you. So for

me, if I have an investment account and on November 1st, I have a starting balance of $10,000. Let's see. Now,

let's pretend I got some dividends and I got some interest paid in that account.

So, I'm going to add a new transaction.

I'm going to say on December 15, I earned interest.

And remember, we put in a category of interest under income.

So, I earned, I don't know, $53 in interest.

We're going to turn on the running balance again so we can kind of see how this is changing as we go along.

Uh now let's say on December 27th I got dividends and you don't have to do this on the actual date. You know what I would be

actual date. You know what I would be inclined to do which is even easier is just to take all the dividends you earned in the month, all the interest you earned in a month and put it as one transaction at the very end of the month. That's even easier. If you want

month. That's even easier. If you want to do it on the actual date, you can.

Lumping everything for one month onto one transaction on the last day of the month makes sense if you want to keep it simple. So again, we're going to go down

simple. So again, we're going to go down to income. We're going to classify this

to income. We're going to classify this as a capital gain. We're going to say we got $321 in capital gains. So now you can see

I've got a balance of $10,8521.

Now, of course, if I'm holding stocks, mutual funds, bonds, etc., the value of those things has changed during the course of the month. So that balance won't be accurate. So what I tend to do is I look on the last day of the month

and I say, "Okay, what's the balance in my investment account?" Let's say the balance in my investment account was $10,121.

Well, I know that it made $15 in gains from my investments, right? So what I would do is I would just put down here uh capital gain.

And you might want to make a note that it's unrealized.

Oops.

So, we're saying that I've had an unrealized capital gain for the month.

Oops. We're going to categorize that under the income capital gains category.

We're going to call the deposit of $15.

And now you can see I've got this balance of $10,121, which ideally now matches my statement that I got at the end of the month. And

so every month that's what I would do is I would just have your opening balance, you know, your running balance because obviously we're going to date this for December 31st.

There we go. So what I'm saying is this is my correct balance on December 31st.

I've accounted for everything that happened during the month. Next month

I'll just put an entry for whatever interest I earned. I'll put an entry for whatever dividends I earned. I'll make

an adjusting entry for capital gains either gained or lost. and that will be my new balance at the end of the month.

So, it's not perfect if you're the kind of guy, you know, or person that you want to see that balance every single day be absolutely accurate. This might

be a challenge for you. For me, I'm not that, you know, your market value of your investments goes up and down every day. I watch it in my brokerage account.

day. I watch it in my brokerage account.

I don't watch it in my budgeting and spending um software. So, for me, this is plenty fine to have an accurate balance at the end of every month. I'm

totally good with that. I don't need to see it every day. This is a very simple way to keep track of your investments.

Um, if you choose to wind up all of your interest and all of your dividends at the very end of the month, literally on the last day of every month, you can do this in about 30 seconds, right? Look at

the statement, put in the dividends, put in the interest, put in a capital gain or capital loss um to balance out the account. Boom, you're done. It doesn't

account. Boom, you're done. It doesn't

take any time at all. So, it's really simple.

So, let's talk a little bit then about the reporting. Now in quicken you'll

the reporting. Now in quicken you'll find that reporting is often geared towards printing reports. You can print a lot of great reports. The one thing about actual budget is the reporting is

much more visual. So reporting is easily found here in the reports tab on the left. And what you get is you get a

left. And what you get is you get a great dashboard that gives you a whole lot of data about your finances. So what

we see here is information like total income, total expenses, your average per month, your average per transaction.

There's comparisons month overmonth change in your net worth. Uh this from October to December 2025. So there's all kinds of data. We're not going to go super deep into here. When you click on each of these, it kind of gives you the

math for it. And you can adjust your time setting from one month, 3 months, 6 months, the last year, whatever you want. You may wonder why the total

want. You may wonder why the total income is so high.

That's because when you first set up actual budget and you put in all those starting balances, the starting balances are included as income for the month.

So, because all her starting balances were done on November 1st, all those starting balances show as income in November. Uh, it's unfortunate that you

November. Uh, it's unfortunate that you can't undo that. At least I haven't found a way so far to undo that. Again,

I've only been using this for a couple of months. Haven't really dug into it.

of months. Haven't really dug into it.

Um, but just be aware that that first month all those starting balances will show up as income. Now, you can make modifications to how this is calculated.

Uh, you can adjust all this reporting as you want. When you go to the report

you want. When you go to the report section, you can add different widgets that can be put onto your dashboard. You

can adjust your dashboard as well. So,

you can set this screen up to show basically whatever you want to show from your finances. That gives you the

your finances. That gives you the information that you need in a really quick fashion. Now, you note that I have

quick fashion. Now, you note that I have a red line here. It says one uncatategorized transaction. That means

uncatategorized transaction. That means when I was putting transactions in here with you, I forgot to categorize something. So, let's click on that. and

something. So, let's click on that. and

it's taking me to my credit card where that Best Buy transaction I never put a category on. So, let's go ahead. We're

category on. So, let's go ahead. We're

going to categorize that $4,200 expense as entertainment. We'll hit enter.

as entertainment. We'll hit enter.

And now that is categorized. We're not

going to have that indication. If we go to our credit card, we can see that entertainment expense showing up here.

We go back to our reporting. It doesn't

say there's any uncatategorized transactions anymore. And that's

transactions anymore. And that's important because the next screen we're going to look at is the budget. So, this

is kind of cool. This is where it compares your spending against your budget. Now, of course, I haven't put a

budget. Now, of course, I haven't put a budget in. I never set one up. All I've

budget in. I never set one up. All I've

been doing is tracking my expenses. And

if that's all you want to do, that's fine. You can simply use this to track

fine. You can simply use this to track your expenses month over month. And you

can see different series of months, different time frames, etc. How your spending panned out with each one.

So, we're going to look here in December. We've got income and expenses

December. We've got income and expenses here. We don't have those uh starting

here. We don't have those uh starting balances showing up. They will show up back here in November. They don't in December because of course now we're a month clear of when they were input. But

the neat thing about this is let's pretend my uh let's call it December. Let's pretend

December is all the expenses I typically have in a month. Well, setting up a budget then becomes pretty easy because I can set up a budget based on those expenses.

And the easy way to do that is to go up here in the upper right where you have some options. You can set the budgets to

some options. You can set the budgets to zero, copy last month's budget, set budgets to a three-month average, etc. So, when you've only got one month of budgeting, using the three-month average is probably going to work okay, right?

Because it's just going to take the the one month. Now, I've got a month and a

one month. Now, I've got a month and a bit because I started this in November.

I don't have a lot of data for November.

So, that's going to throw things off.

But if we just just to demonstrate if I say set budgets to the three months average, you can see it will automatically fill in all the budgeting for me.

Now what you can do after that is you can just copy last month's budget to make multiple budgets. So we're going to go copy last month's budget for January.

We're going to go copy last month's budget for February. And actually I think what we should do is we should go and look at multiple months.

And so we can do that quite simply. Just

up here in the upper left, you see the multiple calendars. I've got just one

multiple calendars. I've got just one selected. So that means I'm looking at

selected. So that means I'm looking at just one month of budgeting. If I hit the second one, now I've got two months of budgeting, three months, four months, five months. So as you can see as you go

five months. So as you can see as you go along, you can just say copy last month's budget. Copy last month's budget

month's budget. Copy last month's budget and your budget fills in. So after I've done that, you can just go down. If you

need to adjust this, it's dead simple.

Your auto expenses, let's say, no, it's not $13. It's going to be $350 for the

not $13. It's going to be $350 for the month. You just click on it. You can

month. You just click on it. You can

change the numbers. It's really, really simple. Um, but the more data you have,

simple. Um, but the more data you have, if you have the three full months of data and then you select that button to generate an automatic budget, it's going to be much more accurate.

So that's really the budgeting process.

Every month as you go along and you input your transactions, it's going to compare what you've spent to what you budgeted and what the balance is. So, if

we just look here at the top line, it says I budgeted 700 bucks uh in total for expenses. I spent 740, so $40 over

for expenses. I spent 740, so $40 over my budget. Dead simple. As you go

my budget. Dead simple. As you go through the month and you're entering your transactions for your spending, really helps you to uh keep in mind whether you're on track to meet your budget, whether you're going over your budget, or you're going to have excess

savings.

So, that's my quick and dirty review of Actual Budget. I think this is fantastic

Actual Budget. I think this is fantastic software. I like the fact it's free and

software. I like the fact it's free and open source. Now, having said that, if

open source. Now, having said that, if you do make use of the software and you enjoy it, you should consider making a donation. If you go to the actual budget

donation. If you go to the actual budget website on their blog, you'll see they have all kinds of improvements planned for 2026. And of course, that doesn't

for 2026. And of course, that doesn't come for free. So, if you're making use of the software, you can afford to make a donation, you're able to. It's a

really nice thing to do to show appreciation for the developers. I also

like the fact that I'm totally in control of the software. It's not doing a bunch of automated stuff behind my back. Sometimes when that automated

back. Sometimes when that automated stuff goes wrong, you spend more time fixing it than it would take to just have done the work right yourself in the first place. Uh I like the fact it's

first place. Uh I like the fact it's real lightweight. You can run it on just

real lightweight. You can run it on just about any computer. It doesn't take a lot of system resources. So overall, I just love actual budget. In fact, I let my Quicken subscription expire in

December 31st. This is now the only

December 31st. This is now the only budgeting and financial tracking software that I'm using. It's been

working really, really well for me. I'd

like to get your thoughts though, especially if you've used Quicken in the past. What do you think actual budget?

past. What do you think actual budget?

Now, I know this was a quick overview. I

think it's enough to give you an idea of how the software works. If you're

interested in it, I'm hoping that it's enough to get you started and get going fairly quickly on it. But what do you think? Is it something you'd be

think? Is it something you'd be interested in? Do you think that this

interested in? Do you think that this more simplified model works better than Quicken? Or do you like a more robust

Quicken? Or do you like a more robust solution that has more automation and a little bit more going on even though you have to pay the subscription price? Let

me know what you think. I hope you'll look at giving Actual Budget a try if you are a quick user. And that wraps it for this video. Don't forget to like and subscribe if you found this video helpful. Again, I'm Graeme Hughes. I'll

helpful. Again, I'm Graeme Hughes. I'll

look forward to seeing you on the next

one.

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