Why building your own budget tracker can be worth it

Sticking to spending targets is hard. Being more actively involved in monitoring your transactions can help get you back on track. One established way to do this is by creating your own budget tracker.

Increased accountability

Tracking outgoing expenses by a tool that one has created themselves can give an increased sense of accountability to keep on top of spending.

Moreover, you are likely to continue using a tracker that you had put time and effort into building.

Personally, this built-it-yourself approach works best for me to control my spending compared to using an off-the-shelf third-party app.

The main reason why is due to the feeling of fulfilment by consistently using it with my own transaction data and observing first-hand the progress of improving my spending habits.

The automatic sync function of third-party apps can take away the sense of participation of adding your own transactions to a budget tracker and creating your own personalised visualisations.

Actively involved

Instead, a self-build approach can give the user an increased level of commitment towards tracking spending compared to third-party apps.