Jonathan Poh

minimalmac:

What? That? Up there? The picture? Well, I’ll tell you about that in a second. First, a story…

Before my wife, Princess Bethany, and I got married, we took a course on money management for couples. The course was led by Ruth Hayden, author of the very excellent book For Richer, Not Poorer: The Money Book for Couples. You should buy it. Seriously. You see, money differences and problems are one of the leading causes of breakups and divorce. Anyway, one of the strategies she advocates is to figure out how much money you need every month for your day to day stuff beyond bills, divide it by 31 to find your daily budget, and then get that amount in cash (yes, the dead tree, smokable kind). Spending cash makes you very conscious of exactly how much you have to spend. The rule is that when it’s gone, it’s gone, and you have to do without.

It’s a killer idea and one I don’t do often enough. Largely because getting and dealing with cash these debit card days is kind of a pain. Online purchases in iTunes, Amazon orders, software purchases - there are plenty of things you can’t easily pay for in cash. Which brings me to the screenshot above. It’s an iPhone app called Left to Spend (iTunes link). Here is how the developer describes it:

To use ‘Left to spend’, all you need to do is set up a daily allowance that you KNOW won’t break your budget. Every day this amount will be added to your total allowance. Whenever you spend money you simply open ‘Left to spend’ and enter the amount, which is then subtracted from your total allowance. If your total allowance is running low, you need to slow down your spending and wait for your allowances to accumulate. As long as you never get below 0, you’ll never have to worry about money again.

Yep, a solution to the problem. Cash, or no cash, track spending just the way it was recommended in my story above. It’s an elegant little app that does one thing well (Paging Mr. Mottram!). Not only that but it is an excellent first project for a struggling student abroad so help him out with a few cents from your daily budget.

(Submitted to Minimal Mac by the developer, Lauge Jepsen. Full disclosure; He did give me a freebie code to check it out. Doing so did not guarantee a review – positive or otherwise.)