Whether or not you agree with the politics behind the budget, a new milestone was marked today with the President delivering the United States' 2009 budget via electronic document on a notebook computer. The goal is to save some money (about $1M), some paper (about 20 tons), and therefore some trees (about 500).
It got us thinking, though, about how we keep our own budgets. We're working on switching over to all electronic, but sometimes, parts of it will still get written on paper, mostly when we're planning for the future and trying to save X amount.
I use excel when I remember, I don't think I've put a budget together since before Christmas (though I did track my gift-buying so as to save more realistically this year). I have used Microsoft Money in the past (when I was in college and took a very valuable personal finance class), and I used Quicken briefly after I bought my mac, just the basic version came free. I didn't really utilize it fully, and I felt like excel offered the most simplicity and room to customize.
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I use a combination of MS Money and a spreadsheet in Google Documents. I use Money to keep track of bank statements (Love the graphs it makes so I can see where my money is going) and GDocs to keep track of bills that need to be paid during each pay period. Systems works fairly well for me.
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My husband tracks expenses with GnuCash, but keeps the actual budget in OpenOffice Calc (that's a plain old spreadsheet).
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I use Quicken - a very outdated version, but it works fine for me.
BTW, Bush there's some question as to whether GWB actually submitted that budget "electronically" - http://wonkette.com/352918/lonely-george-w-bush-gives-his-laptop-to-congress
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