Montra (Money Tracker) helps protect consumers from negative balances by offering a simple way to predict the risks of overspending.
Expense Planning Challenge
There are two types of irregular expenses – irregular bills and varying or unexpected expenses. The common characteristic of all is that they are hard to plan. While most financial software can easily plan consistent expenses like car or mortgage payments, varying or unexpected expenses are more difficult to plan. That puts your budget at risk of going dangerously low or even negative before the next paycheck arrives.
Montra focuses specifically on varying or unexpected expenses.
How Montra works
Joe is our average consumer who wants to get a better handle on his spending. Joe noticed that he’d been running out of money before the biweekly paychecks and had to resort to credit cards multiple times.
For simplicity, let’s start with zero dollars in Joe’s pocket. He’s getting a paycheck today and the next paycheck in two weeks. The amount is $2,000, and he has only $1,000 for the day-to-day expenses. Bills and other regular payments take up another $1,000.
Joe uses a phone calendar to plan his work weeks and weekends. He starts by entering event costs right in the descriptions of the calendar events. Joe can use the calendar or enter the amounts directly into the application for things like Starbucks or shopping. He also makes good use of the “Quick Entry” function of the application to record the expenses as they happen.
When the projected budget stops matching the amount on hand due to a missed expense or any other reason, Joe quickly resets the budget in Montra to the amount on hand for the current date, resetting the projection and re-calculating any possible risks of overspending.
Ongoing use of Montra is much easier as Joe feels motivated to record the current and future costs of the events in his calendar and application.
Why Montra
Unlike many other financial analysis and planning software, Montra requires no personal or financial information. No need to enter names, dates of birth, etc. No need to connect with one’s bank.
How easy-to-use is the financial software that helps you look ahead and predict risks? Even if you use one, it is likely not easy since that’s likely not the primary or only goal it tries to accomplish.
Since the main focus is on projecting the near future of your spending budget, none of the past information is as critical for the projection as the expected near-future expenses. This information is still in the user’s mind or, hopefully, planned in the user’s calendar.
Before You Start
Montra, being intentionally homophonic to “mantra” requires repetition and diligence of the one who wants to be in control of their spending. The effect of the tool is only as good as the mastery of the one who uses it.
Montra is still in development, at an early stage.
Source at: https://github.com/ykazarov/montra