Household Budget Made Easy by Pocketbook

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Always up-to-date transaction data

Why fuss with manually downloading and cleaning your transaction data? Pocketbook does it safely and automatically... and keeps it up to date.

Automatically categorise your transactions

Why bother with Excel formulas? You'll find 80% of transactions already smartly categorised. McDonald's is "food", the pub is "drinks".

Perfect charts for analysing your spending

Why waste time thinking about different ways to visualise your data? Our analyse feature have figured it out for you.

Recommended by financial professionals

Financial planners and accountants recommend Pocketbook to their clients. We make everyone's life easier.

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"Since using Pocketbook, I feel more in control of my money."

"I love that it reminds me if something is unusual, like a forgotten bill payment."

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Budget using Pocketbook like Rebecca

The Importance of a household budget

It's typical for Australian families to plan their finances together - setting up a household budget. According to the BT Australian Financial Health Index, one in three households in Australia do not have savings.

Most Australian household budgets have an ultimate goal that revolves around the family home. Either saving up to buy a home or paying off the home mortgage. So managing spending to create savings, or extra mortgage payments is a key component. This means most households that keep a budget will log their spending in one way or another. Some collecting receipts, others manually logging in a notebook or spreadsheet, others using budget planning software.

Biggest household budgeting mistakes

While similar disciplines and rules apply to individual or joint budgeting. There are a number of things you can do specifically for a joint household budget to make sure it is successful.

Only one person in the family knows about it - In many scenarios, there's typically one champion of the budgeting process per household. While it's perfectly fine for one person to run and track the progress against the budget, others in the household need to be aware of the limits in order to manage their spending.
Partners don't talk about their shared goals - In other cases, partners don't talk about things they need to save for with one another. The motorbike or holiday they want, plans to take time off work to pursue postgraduate study are all examples where discussions are critical to make the household budget work.
There's no accountability for individuals - Often, where household budgets fall apart is because there's no accountability for individuals when they break their spending rules. There's no discussion and revisit of the budget, and typically no recourse. While this can happen for external spending, this can also happen when loans are made between family members. Accounting and monitoring of all spending activity and measuring this against the goals set out in the budget is highly important.
No emergency fund or salary protection - Most families don't have emergency fund or have insurance against the cases where the main income earner may not be able to continue providing. Buying salary protection insurance for the primary breadwinner is a great idea to manage this risk. Regardless, an emergency fund equating to 3 months salary should be a default savings goal.
Children aren't taught to be responsible with money - Finally, many mums and dads don't teach children the importance of money management. Some dote their kids and buy them whatever they wanted without any lessons on earning for what they really wanted. There is plenty of financial literacy material on the Internet for kids. One of our favourites is Playmoolah.

Why is Pocketbook better for your household budget

We created Pocketbook as a tool to help make budget planning ridiculously simple. Especially if you have multiple individuals using multiple bank accounts in a household, Pocketbook gives you the flexibility to link all of them for a single-view of money.

At sign-on, we take 60 seconds for you to sync all your household's banking information, detect regular bill payments, forecast them and categorise up to 80% of transactions. A process, which typically takes hours, now takes literally minutes. We repeat this process daily so your information in Pocketbook is always up to date. You can understand how you're going against your budget at all times!

Another feature to keep you on track is our Safely Spend feature. Which automatically peels away your regular bill spending and suggests a discretionary spend which helps you focus on a weekly goal for your household to spend to. We send you alerts to inform you as your Safely Spend limit decreases over the week.

Quite simply, if you want to get your household budget started correctly, and keep on track with it, then Pocketbook is the personal finance tool you must have.

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