Any checking account to which you have regular access is useful for home budgeting.
When it's time to create a home budget, you need a solution that's easy so you don't have to devote too much time to managing your money. While you might initially assume you need a specific type of checking account to keep a home budget, that's not the case. Any checking account can be used for managing your household budget, as long as you have a way to look at transactions when needed. The way you choose to manage and organize your home budget is what makes all the difference.
Computer Software
Computer software is the easiest tool to use for keeping track of your household budget. Most of the top checking account management software programs also incorporate budgeting tools and techniques so that you can manage your financial life and home budget at the same time. Computer software that automatically connects to your bank account to reconcile transactions makes things even easier because you don't have to worry about entering transactions multiple times or making entry mistakes.
Internet Software
Several Internet software applications are designed to automatically connect to multiple checking accounts and help keep your finances up to the date in real time. The software also helps you organize and classify spending so that you can create and maintain a home budget with little to no additional effort.
Spending Categories
The primary feature you need to keep track of your budgeting plans is spending categories. Spending categories let you classify each purchase you make so the associations can be mapped to a corresponding budget category. If you allocate $100 per week to groceries for example, then each time you purchase groceries you need to mark it at such in your checking or budget application. By marking the expenditure with a specific category, you can see at a glance how much money you are spending in specific areas and whether you have exceeded the budgeted amount.
Multiple Accounts
Some people like to use multiple checking accounts to manage their home budgets instead of assigning spending categories. To use multiple checking accounts, you simply open as many accounts as you need for budgeting. One for your mortgage or rent, one for groceries and one for household bills for example. When you get paid, you deposit your check into your main account and then transfer specific amounts to each budget account. Then when you need to spend money for a specific budget item, you simply spend directly from the associated account. This is a difficult way to track more than a few budget items, however, and it can get expensive if each account has monthly fees.
