Review and Giveaway: Pear Budget

I am so excited to introduce to you a great budgeting tool that I use to track my own spending: Pear Budget.  Pear Budget is an online budgeting program that enables you to plan your budget, organize your receipts, and see your spending at a glance.  It's as if you spent hours creating a super-detailed Excel spreadsheet, except that you didn't have to do that.  Instead, you pay just $3/month, and you have access to records of all your spending at a glance.  I normally hate paying for things that it seems like I could do myself, but I have found this to be 100% worth it for the better track I keep of our finances.

To get started with Pear Budget, you simply plan your spending, entering budgeted amounts into the pre-selected or custom categories.  You can make each category either a monthly or an irregular expense.  Monthly expenses are for bills that tend to be the same each month, whereas irregular expenses are the ones that you don't pay every month or which vary each month.  For the irregular expenses, you can put aside a certain amount each month, and the program tracks how much you have saved up in that category. 

You can change your budgeted amounts each month or at any time during a month.

After you have your budget set, you start to enter your receipts.  Entering a receipt is a simple matter of putting in the date, amount, category, and an optional note or tag.  I do this with with keyboard shortcuts without even touching my mouse, and it takes only a couple of seconds to enter each receipt.  I try to enter my receipts every week or so, and I try to enter online orders and bills as soon as I pay them.  You can also set up automatic recurring receipts for monthly bills which never change, like your mortgage.

Once you have entered your receipts into the program, you can see all your spending at a glance.  There are a number of different ways to view it, including by month, by category, by receipts, and even the year in review (which gives a helpful average for each category). 

I find Pear Budget to be a great program for my needs for several reasons.  It is very simple and streamlined, so it is easy and unintimidating to start and maintain.  Further, while there are other online programs which automatically track your spending, my husband prefers us not to link up our accounts.  Manually entering receipts also has the advantage of making it easy for me to make sure each receipt is in the correct category - I often break up totals if they fall into more than one category.

I like Pear Budget so much that I contacted them to see if they would like to partner with me for the Relevant Conference.  They agreed to give me two six-month memberships to give away to bloggers at the conference!  If you gave me your business card at Relevant, you were entered!  And the two winners (chosen by mixing up all the cards in my daughter's Halloween firefighter hat and randomly drawing two) are:

Lisa of Simplified Saving
and
Mitzi of Mitzi Eaker

I am notifiying the winners by email.

And even if you were not a blogger at the conference, you still have a chance to try Pear Budget for FREE!  Pear Budget is giving away one year-long membership to a Frugally Blonde reader!

To enter, please just leave a comment on this post saying what is your favorite feature of Pear Budget.  You must answer this question to enter.  Please include your email in your comment if it is not available in your profile. For extra entries, you may do any or all of the following, for a maximum of 4 entries in total (please leave a separate comment for each):

1) Follow Frugally Blonde by rss feed.

2) Follow Frugally Blonde by email

3) Follow Frugally Blonde on Twitter and tweet about this giveaway. (Leave a link to your tweet.) This may only be done once; no daily tweets.

The contest ends on Thursday, November 11, at midnight. The contest is open to residents of the US only, and the winner must provide a valid mailing address (no PO boxes).  I will choose the winner randomly and notify him or her by email, and he or she will have 72 hours to respond.  Good luck!

The prizes were provided by Pear Budget, who also comped my membership as a thanks for spreading the word about their program.  I received no other compensation for this reveiw, and the opinions are my own.