Blog Archives

Budget Your Trip Helps You Allocate Cash and Plan for Travel at Home and Abroad [Travel]

If you’re looking to do some traveling, Budget Your Trip can help you not only plan your travel expenses but track them while you’re traveling.

Budget Your Trip is a web site devoted to planning and budgeting travel expenses. You’ll find no shortage of web sites that cater to helping you budget in general, but the feature set of Budget Your Trip is heavily geared towards travel planning. You can plan a trip from scratch or build your trip budget off the existing averages and sample budgets they have for a variety of locales. If they don’t have a budget for the locale you’re traveling to, you can always save yours and add it to the global averages so future users can get an idea how much it costs to hit the mean streets of Whytucky, Kansas.

We'd definitely encourage you to double check any odd items you see in the projected average budgets, however. While we found the averages to be reasonable in most instances, we found a few odd balls in the mix—$2,719 average daily alcohol expenditure for budget travel in Paris made us wonder if there was a decimal problem or a traveler out there somewhere we really needed to go tour Paris with.

In addition to estimating your travel expenses you can actively track and update them as you travel. Penciled in $200 for your daily accommodations but got offered an upgrade to an ocean view for $215? Swap it out on the fly and a new budget is generated.

Have a favorite tool for travel planning, budget-related or otherwise? Let’s hear about it in the comments.






BudgetSketch Creates a Workable Budget Before You Spend Your Money [Budgeting]

Web application BudgetSketch is a free personal finance budgeting application focused on collaboratively planning out your spending for future months rather than simply tracking the money you’ve spent in the past.

We’ve seen a lot of impressive personal finance tools designed primarily to help you track where your money has gone (perhaps most notably Mint), but BudgetSketch focuses less on the past and more on budgeting for the future—or as they put it, on "tak[ing] command of where [your] money is going, not where it has gone." You can set goals (pay off credit card), lay out your monthly expenses, and compare it all against your income to quickly see what your cashflow for upcoming weeks looks like. You can also link your account up with your significant other or kids to collaborate on your budget.

BudgetSketch is free to use, requires an email address to sign up.






Alice Takes Household Shopping Off Your To-Do List [Budget]

Everyone’s looking for ways to squeeze more time into the day. Web site Alice aims to give you an hour or two back by automating household shopping.

The idea is pretty simple. Create a free account, which includes setting up your household (family members and items used), then start shopping. When you choose an item to add, you’re given the option to create a custom label, choose the quantity, select how often to be reminded that you’re running low, and determine whether to add it to a current order or a future purchase.

But Alice doesn't stop there. Aside from ordering items and having them shipped to you—free—Alice offers coupons, checks product prices, provides product reviews and even manages your household budget.

With charts similar to Mint, the most popular web-based personal finance app, Alice breaks down your spending by room, by family member, and by transactions—keeping tabs of the last 12 months of purchases.

Eventually Alice will offer the option to auto-ship supplies, potentially removing many of the “How did I run out of coffee?!?” moments from your life.





Getting Started With Canning, aka Home Food Preservation [Saving Money]

Canning is one of those home kitchen skills that seemed to be lost in the last few generational shifts. That’s a shame, because it’s an economical, menu-boosting skill, and pretty easy to pick up.

Photo by thebittenword.com.

In a supplement to a New York Times piece on the glories of canning—a phrase that includes putting food in jars, making preserves, pickling, and other preservation methods—you'll find a whole bunch of resources for indulging your inner Italian grandmother. The Times supplement itself provides an overview of what to know before getting started, but a step-by-step slideshow and a sidebar video on “Checking the seal” provide visual help. If that’s not enough, there are links (included below) to U.S. Department of Agriculture guides, free online courses in canning (seriously), and instructional videos from Jarden, the maker of the gold standard Ball/Kerry jars.

So, wait, why would you want to get down with canning, exactly? Besides the glory of making your own homebrew pickles, you can get ahead on better-than-Prego tomato sauces, salsas, and other pantry staples. You also waste less food by turning that whole bushel of apricots your friends brought over into delicious cereal toppings for this winter, when your fruit options are going to be far more limited.

Hit the links below for some preservation primers, and drop your own canning/preserving tips and tales in the comments.





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