*Nope, this post has not been sponsored by Monefy or anything (unfortunately? haha); this is just my personal opinion.*
For many university students, living on your own is the first big step to adulthood, which comes with being independent, learning to enjoy your sole company, taking into account mundane tasks such as doing the laundry… and managing your finances. And unless you have been well-educated about the subject, this can be quite a challenge especially with such a small allowance, which ends up mostly in rent, utilities and food. And sometimes, even that RM1 daily coffee can accumulate to a lot at the end of the month, which will make you wonder: “Where did my money go?”
If you have no choice but to learn the art of budgeting on your own, by trial and error, like me, the dexterity of dividing your allowance, however small, effectively, then I’d strongly recommend you to try out Monefy! 🙂 It’s a simple and colourful money-tracking app that I’ve been in love with and been using for the past few months.
There is a much better app in the US called Mint, which is a money-tracking app which connects to your bank accounts, but I’m unfortunately in Malaysia, so every night, I sit down on my bed, receipts of the day around me, manually keying the information of my expenses in the app.
There’s nevertheless an advantage to managing your finances manually: it makes you more aware of what you spend and allows you some time to think about your financial choices. Besides, it usually takes me around 1 min to get it all done, so it doesn’t hurt.
As you can see, you can keep track of your expenses monthly, weekly, daily… and even yearly (not shown)! It’s nice to be able to look at what you do with your money from a ‘big picture’ point of view as well as a detailed, close-up one. I usually leave it on the ‘daily’ option as I do tend to have a daily budget for myself and since I have been using Monefy I realised that I do tend to be more motivated to spend less and more evenly so as to keep the numbers consistent as I swiped through the days. I am now more aware of big expenses and feel the need to compensate the next day if I did spend too much before that.
Moreover, the main reason why the app feels so easy on the eyes in terms of managing your finances is the use of a categorical pie chart. Each category has its own assigned colour and it even gives you the percentage of you spending in a particular category as compared to your general expenses as a whole!
It is basically when you input an item (either cash-in (+) or cash-out(-)) that you can categorize it. The names of the categories are customisable but if you want to change the icons, you’ll have to buy premium. So far, the categories have been just fine. You can also track your categorized expenses in greater detail by tapping on the ‘balance’ button.
And yes you can also record your revenues (and these ‘cash-in’ transactions also have other categories, mainly, deposits, savings and salary)!
Furthermore, you can open multiple accounts in which you can have different transactions. I made myself a checking account (which I kept as ‘cash’, the default name) where I would record all current daily transactions and my monthly student allowance. I then created a ‘savings’ account, to keep track of my actual savings account, which I’ve talked about before in a previous post and which I intend only to ‘cash-in’… to save! Duh!)
So yeah, unless you live in the US and can access the amazing Mint app, you should give Monefy a try: it’s so ridiculously simple and yet so useful!
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On another note, I am finally done with exams! (which is actually why I haven’t been blogging lately although I said that I would blog every week) So I’m hopefully getting back on my blogging schedule 🙂
‘Til then,
An Evil Nymph.
An Evil Nymph's Blog 
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