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So last week I did a post about my dealings with NeoBudget during the initial discovery and set up phase. I wanted to do a follow up post on what happened and why I ultimately have decided this program is not for my family.

A brief recap during the set up phase…

I found for the most part that setting up an initial account wasn’t difficult, once you understood the concepts. I forced me to really calculate the debts and spending accounts I should be saving for on a monthly basis – Point to the positive. The initial data entry was simple. The program flowed well. I did find difficulty trying to get back to a screen I wanted. There were times I knew I entered information but then I couldn’t seem to find it again. Not to toot my horn – but I am relatively computer competent and I worked as a beta tester for similar types of programs. People who may not be used to figuring out programs on their own may find this intimidating and there are no tutorials as of yet to teach the average consumer.

I also experienced some time delays when entering goals for my separate envelopes. I don’t exactly know what caused such delays and my computer tech confirmed all my programs were up to date. (I was running NeoBudget in IE and didn’t try it in Firefox. The company later mentioned “We are using some newer advanced technologies that are only supported in modern browsers (IE 7, Firefox 2 or 3, and Safari 3″). )  Once I had all of the information set up, including the income per month and the envelope data, I let things rest until my deposits were made into the bank a few days later.

Here is where NeoBudget will not work well for me personally:

Our income is highly variable. Because of my husband’s occasional overtime and my freelance income, there were just too many factors affecting my ability to adequate allocate money to all of the envelopes using this program. Because of the extra cash we had this pay period, I wanted to allocate more funds to different envelopes which became too confusing since the amount of income wasn’t guaranteed each time. Also, we are still living paycheck to paycheck for the most part and without “extra” cash, it was just too hard for me to make predictions, like I can do now on paper. I also found it difficult to correct errors that I entered. I had to ultimately resort to contacting the company.

However, another point to the positive – I contacted NeoBudget by email and explain some of my issues and asked some questions. The owner, Luke, was extremely accommodating and timely with his reply. He answered all my questions clearly. I did go back to implement the resolutions and they worked.

My Opinion:

Overall, I think this is a solid program for consumers who can use it to their advantage. There is still a month free trial offer to try out NeoBudget for your own family and budgeting needs and I would recommend giving it a try, as well as giving feedback to the developer on your own experience.



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