Read how Cibrán has gone from messy money management to structured budgeting using PocketSmith to balance his family’s finances.
I’m from Spain and am settled here again after living in the US and Germany for quite a long time. I’m happily married and have two kids, one 8-year-old boy and a 6-year-old girl. I’m passionate about technology, sports, photography, learning/reading and self-development. Professionally, I’ve started working in IT and have been freelance for the past 11 years as commercial.
Considering myself an overall responsible person, I must admit I’m quite a scatterbrain in general. With money and the household, it is no exception. Therefore I need tools to help me out (e.g. task managers), and PocketSmith is the best in personal finances. I also love analytics and enjoy having everything categorized and budgeted.
My wife is quite the opposite, hating all these metrics and budgeting much more by feeling but being very conscious of “where we are with our money”. In the last year, this translated into telling me at the end of the month we have to add extra money to the common account.
It is a good mix, but it is even better if we can really forecast our spending so that there are no urgent extra transfers.
One was that we were budgeting very badly, and the other was that I love analytics and think they are the clue for better planning in general and, in this specific case, for budgeting. I also wanted to plan my personal finances for the future.
I had been using a Spanish tool for years, and although it looked great, it was very basic. So, I decided to look for an alternative. I spent two whole months testing different tools and was quite disappointed since I had to give up important features in any of them. When I gave up and chose one available in Europe called Wallet, I came across PocketSmith and saw the light.
It’s not perfect, but almost. It’s by far the most complete tool I’ve ever tried. The support offered for its complexity is lovely. It is from an “outsider” country like New Zealand, and the things that are not available yet are being worked on.
Only three months. I spent the first 1.5-2 months on the migration, classification and study of all the learning material and made use of the very kind and thorough support. Since then, it has run smoothly and very automatically with bare maintenance.
I use it primarily for improving budgeting and my net worth for the future. For my professional expenses, I use another tool that includes accounting and homologation to the Spanish tax agency, so I use PocketSmith for my personal and family expenses. And although I would prefer to have two separate profiles, I already have a very clear picture using the workaround suggested by the support team.
It’s day and night. As I said, I already used an automatic transaction classification tool, so I had a relatively good picture of our expenses, but I had to create two separate accounts (with lots of logging in and out). The automatic classification was inaccurate and not customizable, so I had to do lots of corrections, and the categories were not customizable either, so I had to adapt to names that were not meaningful to me The budgeting was poor too. I checked many alternative tools, and they were all similar. I did find one which was a considerable improvement, but none of them have anything on PocketSmith.
PocketSmith is an extremely powerful tool with any possible finance metric you can think of. The budgeting is unparalleled, allowing you to plan very specific expenses. The customization is awesome and the reports are as detailed as the professional financing tools.
The dashboard pages give you all the necessary information at a glance. I love them. I check on the categorization and the budget on a daily basis. Specifically, the budgeting and calendar are way more powerful than what you regularly find. It allows you to determine punctual payments like a bill, spread payments across the whole month, different amounts for specific months, rollover budgets through the year, specific scenarios like a holiday plan, a big purchase, etc.
I find the reports extremely powerful as well: Income and expenses, net worth, cash flow and the trends. I like the latter one very much for being conscious about the expenses so I can make appropriate changes on the budget if necessary.
I encourage users to spend a good amount of time learning about all the powerful possibilities that the tool brings, importing past transactions and categorizing and budgeting appropriately. Once you’ve done that, it runs everything smoothly.
It may sound like I’m sweet-talking, but subscribing to PocketSmith was one of them. With it, I was able to make a detailed savings plan both in my personal and family finances and immediately add to a pension plan last year.
