If you or someone in your household is techy then you can setup Actual Budget on a home server. It's a free YNAB that syncs all your accounts and will categorize expenses once you do tag them.

Another vote for Copilot Money. It literally gives me a complete financial picture—not just expenses but investments, net income, everything. Only took me a few hours to set up and categorize imported transactions. Definitely worth the subscription fee.

I find that YNAB does a decent job of automatically categorizing my spending, although Costco will always confuse it (food? clothing? gas?).

I used to track things manually in Excel but family life has me in a place where (checks YNAB) I have 200 transactions in a month.

My credit card does this for me

Empower’s free app has this feature. Just ignore any phone calls from them.

I love copilot. I’ve used YNAB and even though it’s powerful and amazing for budgeting, copilot is much easier and less effort if you are just trying to track spending. Great user interface.

I just use Excel and pull in credit card and bank statements.

Pen and paper.
There are monthly expenses, yearly, and then just food, and the rest.
The $200 I spend on who knows what, goes under 'other'.
I add it up every month. $6k cash a month usually covers everything.

Checkbook

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:YNAB - you can start with a free trial.

I use and love YNAB, but it's not a spending tracker. OP wants something that will categorize spending FOR them. In YNAB, OP will have to create a budget with categories, and then categorize each transaction as it's made/as it's pulled in by YNAB (if they choose auto-import). Then they will be able to see where their money is going.

OP here. This is correct, and actually I was hoping it would capture past spending and categorize it. Do any of these apps do that? Realistically I am hoping to see a full year of past spending in categories for planning purposes. Thanks for chiming in!

Anonymous wrote:YNAB - you can start with a free trial.

I use and love YNAB, but it's not a spending tracker. OP wants something that will categorize spending FOR them. In YNAB, OP will have to create a budget with categories, and then categorize each transaction as it's made/as it's pulled in by YNAB (if they choose auto-import). Then they will be able to see where their money is going.

YNAB - you can start with a free trial.

P.s. I find the desktop interface on monarch much better than the app…but in an old gen xer.

I really like monarch, and you can get 50% off the 1st year.

I was a mint user for a decade and checked them all out when it was discontinued by Intuit. Monarch has fewer categories than mint but you can still create custom ones. If you use fidelity (or Schwab I presume) for banking it can be a little tricky because it creates transfer transactions to counteract every debit/credit but those are easy enough to handle. Fidelitys credit card is terrible at syncing and only does so every few days, but that’s a fidelity problem. my credit union accounts and chase visa / Amex cards are all seamless.

There are also net worth, net income and cash flow trackers that are very handy as well. I researched them all but have only tried monarch, and love it.

I am trying to get an idea of where my money goes every month/year. I am not necessarily looking to create a budget. I just want a tool that will track my spending and put it in categories using information from my credit cards and bank account.

Anyone recommendation from users out there? I am seeing Monarch coming up in my web searches quite a bit as being one of the most highly rated, but would love to hear from people who actually use these apps.

Thanks