What's a good tool for tracking expenses? Context: I've tried YNAB, but my wife does most of the spending and isn't yet willing to put in the effort to plan monthly budgets right now. It feels like our expenses vary quite a bit month to month, and we don't have clarity on where our money is going. As a first step, I just want to report our expenses so I can look back at the end of a month (or year) and see where our money went. Hopefully this will help us want to budget down the line. What tool would you suggest?

ynab shouldn't require you to plan monthly budgets up front, the way it works is you put in the data and adapt as you go when you get started so its not overwhelming

Right, it doesn't require you to put in any estimates (aka 'targets') up front, but it does require you to have income to cover all your expenses.

If I understand the question correctly, you don't want to budget yet, you want to track instead, why not just print out your bank/credit card statements? YNAB is really intended for budgeting (planning) and not tracking.

https://frumfinance.slack.com/archives/C04FDNE1056/p1766942016967479?thread_ts=1766936849.176659&cid=C04FDNE1056 I (not the OP) think he wants to categorize the expenses which the credit card statements don't do. Also, I think he wants to eventually migrate to actively budgeting.

Monarch does a good job of tracking without much manual work. Just setting some rules when the auto categories don't work. You might be able to get enough info from the free trial and then switch to YNAB with a free license from frum finance? https://monarch.com/referral/nkd2re1skz?r_source=copy

I'm in a similar situation (using YNAB as a Mint replacement much to @mysterious-tomato-10057's chagrin) , I'd still recommend YNAB for the following reasons: • Has pretty seamless integration with all my financial institutions and allow me to catch fraudulent / unexpected charges early • allows me to migrate to budgeting when my situation allows it • can integrate with Frum Finance's data collection efforts