My favorite relationship expert, Paula Abdul, once said, “Opposites attract, and you know it ain’t fiction- just a natural fact. We come together because opposites attract.”
I can fault Ms. Abdul for many things, but her relationship analysis is spot on. Opposites attract. And the fact that you’re reading this post leads me to assume that in your relationship, you’re the money nerd.
You get excited about tax minimization, new investing platforms and optimizing debt payoff. And to take it one step further, you’re probably in a relationship with someone who just doesn’t care to discuss the relative merits of factor investing compared with modern portfolio investing.
So what are you going to do? You have to figure out how to manage money as a couple, without boring your better half to death. That’s where Honeyfi comes in. It’s a money tracking app built just for couples. You can use the app to track, categorize, and discuss expenses, and it’s easy to get the less nerdy partner on board. Here’s why I love Honeyfi.
Shared Or Separate?
Should you and your partner have joint or separate accounts? The answer depends on you, your partner, your relationship status, and 1,000 other factors. Thankfully, Honeyfi is flexible enough to accommodate almost any configuration of couple’s accounts.
Joint accounts only? Honeyfi can help you track your spending together. Want to track individual and joint accounts separately, but in the same App? Honeyfi can handle it. You can even handpick transactions to share while keeping most of your spending and saving private.
You and your partner can handle money the way that you want to. Honeyfi just helps facilitate communication about money.
Real Time Tracking
Honeyfi’s biggest strength is as a money tracking app. I signed up for the app, hooked up our joint checking account, and invited my husband to join the app. From that point forward I got instant alerts any time either of us made a transaction.
I knew my husband forgot his lunch when I saw a $6.02 transaction from BurgerKing at 12:13PM. When he grabbed a few items from the grocery store, I saw the effect on our grocery budget right away.
You can categorize your spending based on three major categories (Bills, Essentials, and Fun) and several subcategories. Honeyfi helps you set up rules, so that your transactions are automatically categorized, but you can override the rules. For example, Walmart transactions are automatically categorized as groceries, but I can override my prescription transactions as health.
Honeyfi has a built in budgeting feature that shows your spending by category for the month. Will you have more month than money? Honeyfi makes it easy to see.
Built In Communication Features
Even better than the tracking features are the built in communication features. When you’re reviewing transactions you can comment on a transaction that you don’t recognize. For example, when I see an Amazon transaction, I usually ask, “What did you buy?” My husband will respond with, “Socks” or “Bike tubes” or “Stuff for the rental property.” That makes it easy to categorize in the app, but more importantly, it makes it easy to track spending for tax time.
I assume that most couples will use Honeyfi for practical communication, but I recommended the app to a couple that needed help with tracking expenses. A week later, my friend showed me that she and her husband started sending GIFs to each other through the app.
It Works
Whether you’re asking about a transaction or sending stupid GIFs, Honeyfi helps you start money conversations with your partner. As the money nerd, you can take 100% responsibility for signing up and connecting the accounts, your partner can just download, log in and participate.
In my own marriage, I’ve used Honeyfi for around 2 months. During that time, I’ve spent a lot less time nagging my husband to send me receipts for tax purposes. I’ve also spent less time wondering about our grocery budget and what we purchased on Amazon. Communication in Honeyfi has replaced our transactional conversations. We still talk about our overall budget and our plans for the future, but we don’t need a spreadsheet in front of us for those conversations (even with Honeyfi, I keep a spreadsheet).
A Few Shortfalls
Despite my love for the app, Honeyfi has a few shortfalls. For example, the auto-categorization rules are not perfect. In particular, the rules associated with Bill Pay transactions don’t seem to stick very well. You’re also not allowed to create your own subcategories; in good news, that won’t bother your non money-nerd partner. In bad news, it will drive you crazy.
Finally, I’m not fond of the budgeting system in Honeyfi. The app uses past expenditures to recommend a budget for you as a couple. However, the app isn’t a zero based budgeting system, and it doesn’t keep track of your savings buckets (which would be my preference).
HoneyFi App
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Real Time Tracking - 95
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Budgeting Feature - 85
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Communication - 90
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Auto Categorization - 60
Summary
HoneyFi is a new app that helps simplify the way couples manage their finances.
Chris Fuchser says
Robert, I’ve read a couple of your reviews of budgeting apps and it sounds like we have similar values in what we’re looking for in a budgeting app, like customizable categories and zero based budgeting. Mint didn’t work for me because though you can add subcategories, you can’t delete the default categories and subcategories, and many of those don’t make sense to me. Another of Mint’s problems is that it doesn’t restrict transaction categorization to just your budget categories, so if you accidentally select (or if Mint selects for you) a category of “Gas and Fuel” (an unnecessarily redundant moniker if there ever was one) rather than the simple “Gasoline” category that you added, then your transaction doesn’t show in your Mint budget and you are left thinking you have more left in your budget than you do. Unless there is a one-to-one correlation between budgeted categories and the categories available for transaction categorization, that budgeting app is a huge fail IMO. Mint can’t track virtual savings goals. It can only track savings goals if that money is kept in a separate account – so 1990s! Do they seriously expect me to open up a separate savings account for every savings goal, including roof replacement, car replacement, A/C and furnace replacement, redoing the back deck, saving for college, etc???Lastly, Mint regularly loses the edits made to recategorize or add notes to pending bank transactions, which pretty much negates the advantage of relying on quick electronic updates from your banks instead of paper receipts.
So what budgeting app do you find yourself using? I tried YNAB (new), but it is useless because it will not allow you to allocate the month’s income to categories until the income actually hits your bank account (hey, if I wanted to wing my budget from day to day, I would not even use a budget). I tried Personal Capital but its budgeting features are miniscule and half baked. Personal Capital equivocates cash flow with budgeting, when budgeting and cash flow are two separate things. One can only set an overall budget in Personal Capital. I am highly surprised that I cannot find a budgeting app that has all these features for a reasonable price:
1. Automatically imports transactions by linking to financial institutions.
2. Allows complete customization of categories.
3. Allows deletion of all non-relevant budget categories so that you don’t inadvertently miscategorize something, an essential feature of a zero-based budgeting plan.
4. Does zero-based budgeting.
5. Allows a carryover of category balances (and optionally, if desired, negative balances) to the next month.
6. Allows multi-month cash flow forecasting.
7. Allows what-if scenarios so that you can actually use your budgeting labors for something useful: planning!
8. Shared with spouse via mobile apps.
9. Mobile apps allow instantaneous checking of how much remains in a budget category. Without this feature, a budget becomes useless, only an after-the-fact reporting rather than actionable information.
10. Allows categorization and notes to be added to pending transactions, and then carries over that category and notes to be carried over when the cleared transaction is downloaded from the financial institution.
11. Allows adjustment of the budget from the mobile app (take $ from one category and place it in another).
12. Allows editing of the prior month’s budget, because Lord knows you won’t have your month’s budget finalized until you review all the month’s expenditures, which will tell you if you need to adjust and move money around to perhaps cover an overage in groceries. Since this review will almost certainly happen after the 1st of the following month, Mint’s practice of locking the prior month on the 1st of the following month is stupid.
13. Allows income to be carried over from month to month (for those with irregular income or for example an early retiree who plans to live out the year on the payout he received 6 months ago).
14. Allows account-agnostic virtual savings goals (essentially additional categories) where the money resides in a virtual bucket just like any other budget category.
15. Remembers that it’s YOUR budget and therefore doesn’t try to cram its restrictive rules down your throat (such as the new YNAB online version which does not allow carryover of negative category balances to be carried over and “repaid” by the following month’s budget allocation).
16. Allows budget splits, but DOES NOT implement them by creating two or more separate virtual transactions from one split transaction (ahem, Mint!), making it difficult to match/reconcile actual transaction amounts to the split virtual transations.
Robert Farrington says
I feel your pain! There isn’t a single budgeting app or tool that does this. My personal favorite that comes very close is Quicken for PC 2007. It had almost all of that list… too bad they didn’t roll a better app for Mac, or create a solid mobile app to tackle it.
I personally use Mint and Personal Capital. I’m stuck between the two, not really satisfied with either, but both give me something of what I’m looking for.
TreyGN says
I have used Mint, Mvelopes, and YNAB (not new, been around since 2004 which longer than Mint and Personal Capital). I’m a budget fanatic and I can assure you that YNAB isn’t useless. I’m not sure what you mean that YNAB will not allow you to allocate funds until the money shows up in your bank account. You can always enter income (before it hits your account), allocate it, and then match it when the income does hit your account, but why would you want to? I can see why you may need to do this when initially determining your budget, but really, once your budget is established, there’s no reason to allocate funds until the money actually does show up in your bank account. The “goals” feature in YNAB is how you build your budget and the great thing is, it allows you to budget as far out in advance as you want. As soon as you allocate and meet all your goals for one month, start on the next month, and then the next, etc. It encourages you to increase your “age of money” and stop living paycheck to paycheck.