Plainbudget: Minimalist Plain Text Budgeting
This is nice, but for budgets to be effective, they need to be across multiple time periods.<p>Budgeting is like an optimization&#x2F;monitoring problem with 2 objectives:<p>1. monthly cash flow &gt; 0 (don&#x27;t ever let your cash situation go negative e.g. credit-card debt)<p>2. maximize(Year End final balance)<p>I have a Google Sheets doc that I&#x27;ve used for years where I have inflows and outflows by month, and a year-end balance that is automatically calculated. This lets me see what my projected cash status will be at the end of the year.<p>At every month, the cash flow (in - out) is calculated -- this prevents me from going underwater at any given period.<p>Having a dynamically updating spreadsheet helps you to monitor those two objective functions and make course-corrections.<p>It&#x27;s simple, it&#x27;s cloud-based and it&#x27;s available on all  devices.