the PearBudget Blog

I’m guessing that most of you who read this use the web-based version of PearBudget. But there are probably a handful of you who use the (free) spreadsheet version of PearBudget. PaidTwice is one of you.

In fact, PaidTwice (who you might know as the head cheerleader behind the Snowflaking debt-payoff movement), just published a lengthy post detailing some tweaks she made to the PearBudget spreadsheet to make it work better for her: Get Out Of Debt: PearBudget Spreadsheet Hacks.

You can read the complete post over at her blog, but I want to mention one of her hacks, as it was something Sarah and I did a lot when we were using the spreadsheet: notes.

With the online version of PearBudget, you can use tags to help you remember the context of your spending: things like where you spent the money, why you spent the money, and so forth. But the spreadsheet version of PearBudget doesn’t give you cells to enter that metadata in. So if you right-click on a cell, you can add a “note” or “comment” (depending on what spreadsheet program you’re using). There, you can add in whatever notes you want to, so you can remember the details of that expense. We found that it was worth the 10 or 15 seconds it took to add a note in … six months later, as we tried to remember what that $250 in “car maintenance” was all about, having a note on the receipt was really useful.

Thanks for the great writeup PaidTwice!

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