Here is some of what you can do with Out Of The Dark
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Quickly create a budget customized for your needs. |
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Easily track your income and expenses against your set budget. |
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Easily set and manage cash-put-aside for annual bills. |
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Easily manage loans, savings, etc by transactional details. |
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Close your month and reset for a new period with three clicks. |
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Save your months to reports in your e-mail before closing for further analysis. |
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Quickly view pictorial summaries of your closed periods. |
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Set an end-of-month e-mail reminder. |
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Do all this and more anytime anywhere on the web anonymously for free. |
Introduction
When people who are using OOTD Budgeting tell us that gaining new financial understanding and motivation to be smarter with their money, is a benefit as tangible as the actual budgeting that they have come to master here, we take it as the ultimate complement.
As much as it is a collection of practical, easy to use online budgeting tools, the OOTD Budgeting website is a temple of good money manners, a lighthouse to turn the darkness of money indifference and ignorance into a shining place of financial health and prosperity. This is why as much as we invest in developing the budgeting tools, we invest in explaining their purpose in life, not only how to use them but also why to use them.
We are passionate about money with zero greed, we recognize that money is the manifestation of matter and that matter is first and foremost the food that our body needs, that if wastefulness has no place in nature, it should have no place in how we handle money. Waste is often the product of not being organized, being organized is what budgeting is all about, and at the end of the day the true value of good budgeting is realized when we face that inevitable question - Can I afford extra $150 per month? Your good budget would do more than just answer this for you in an instance, it would also show you what you can cut and where in order to afford this extra.
You are in control, you tell your money where to go rather than wonder where it went.
Shony
Founder
What is Out Of The Dark (OOTD)?
For a long time you have been busy working hard for your money and you haven't been paying proper attention to where all your money is going,
to keeping track of how much you have coming in every month and how much you pay out for stuff each month, let alone knowing what the totals and balances are and whether you spend more than you make. In short, you have really been in the dark regarding your hard earned money.
And then a good friend told you about this little free website for personal budgeting.
So you gave it a try, got private access there and boom, a friendly budget page is staring at you with empty fields. You figure mmmm... if I only have to do this once I might as well give it a try right now. You take a few minutes to gather your relevant figures as you go through this little budget plugging in all the amounts relevant to you in two simple sections, Cash In and Cash Out, you scroll down to the last field and click the Save button.
Wow, with the totals calculated at the top staring at you for the first time you say to yourself, God, I have been spending more than I can afford, man, I need to get my spending under control, now I see where all the money is going. You quickly adjust some figures, less per month on restaurants, cloths and some other extravagant spending, you click the Save button again and boom, you are no longer spending more than you can afford. You immediately fall in love with this little budgeting site, it's so easy.
What you have done was to get your personal budget in order so that you are not spending out of control and that your spending is in line with what you make every month. Boy, that alone is already taking you out of the dark, but all this is sort of half the OOTD picture really, because to the right of this little budget grey column there is another green column titled "How am I doing this month?" - Welcome to Expense Tracking, arguably as important as budgeting itself.
Now you really get into this. You start maintaining that green column with your actual spending amounts for the current month and it becomes so easy to see how much you are actually spending compared to what you are budgeted for. Saturday morning over your first coffee you fire up the Internet, log into your budget at OOTD and add the $35 you spent last night under the Restaurants category in the green field, and you say "Boy oh Boy I only have 50 bucks left to spend on restaurants this month". Your work takes you out of town for a week, no problem, you log into your OOTD budget again in the hotel and update your spending for the day or last few days, "mmmm I am doing pretty good with my meals spending, more than enough in my budget for my next 3 days in town here, so I will treat myself to more dining at that nice restaurant...".
You get the point. It's so easy and so accessible, it's irresistible.
And then as you start using your OOTD budgeting on a regular basis, you begin to notice all the other little goodies like Cash Put Aside management to help you get a handle on all those bills that come once a year, or Month End Reports to help you save your monthly financial information as you close months and start new ones, or the Money Tree tool to help you look at your financial history of closed months in an easy to understand pictorial view that is a great motivator too. The more you use your OOTD budgeting, the more you find out how easy it can be to be in control of your hard earned money.
Whether you are a starving student or a high flying executive, the basic principle of good personal finance and budgeting remains the same, how much you spend is a function of how much you make, and at the very least you want all the figures in front of you. You want to know how much money you have coming in every month and how much you are spending. Out Of The Dark makes this irresistibly easy.
Many of us who are not budgeting and tracking expenses on a regular basis, are fully aware of the great benefits in doing so and even greater consequences of not doing it, yet we tend to just go along without doing it or maybe trying but not persisting almost exclusively due to the bore of the dreaded chore, and then a few years down the road we look at friends wondering how did they manage to buy their own home while we are still renting. OOTD was created and designed to eliminate both the bore and the chore aspects of budgeting and expense tracking, to help us realize that it is truly easy to be smart with our money and enjoy the benefits too.
You are anonymous at OOTD
All OOTD takes to identify you and communicate with you is your e-mail address. You can use any of your private, anonymous e-mails, and you can also change your e-mail unique identifier at OOTD any time. And so even if someone stole the OOTD server's data, all they will have is a bunch of numbers with no connection to your real identity.
OOTD is also different from many other personal finance online services in that it is not a system that requires you to connect with and expose your personal bank accounts, and so you give nothing and risk nothing. OOTD is not affiliated with any financial services and is not trying to sell you anything or get you to sign up for anything, nor does OOTD force you to use any pre-set rigid financial system. OOTD is dedicated to providing a rich set of flexible online personal productivity tools to allow you to manage your money the way you want in total privacy and anonymity, to make this tool-set your true personal secret weapon. No hidden agenda, no fine print, no signing or agreeing to anything in return for using OOTD. Hummm... maybe except for putting in a good word among your friends, if you like OOTD once you started using it.
Manage your budget and track your expenses with one stroke
Out Of The Dark (OOTD) online budgeting is a budgeting utility with a split personality. It literally splits itself into two identical side by side columns in the budget window, allowing you to master both your budget and your current expense tracking in one stroke, one web page, and one way of doing things.
Rapid Access Budgeting And Tracking - RABAT™ is OOTD's unique technology and system design created in order to offer an online budgeting and tracking experience unmatched by existing traditional methods.
There are no multiple windows, pages and menu options to look for, no need to jump back and forth from one screen to another in order to compare your budget to your current expenses and income, no need to learn and remember one way of working with your budget, and another way of working with your expense and income tracking.
Using OOTD is simple, easy, quick and free
No need to install and learn new software, no need to carry and read manuals, no need to be at home or next to any one computer or in your city or country, no need to learn accounting or even be good with numbers, just fill in the amounts for what you earn and what you pay out every month in a simple "Cash In/Cash Out" format, save it and it is there for you privately and anonymously on the web with bottom line totals calculated and you can come back to your budget as often as you want, make updates, track your current expenses and never be in the dark with where your money is.
Have joint budgeting shared with your partner? Nothing could be easier, just share access to your OOTD budgeting account and both can review and update the joint budget even if one is currently across the ocean on a business trip.
Have a special budgeting need like budgeting for a vacation trip or a wedding? With modifiable categories OOTD can be used for any budgeting purpose imaginable. Customize your categories for the exact budget that you need and help make that wedding a shining success. There are rumors about OOTD users who opened a budgeting account only for a wedding and then fell in love with the website and continued using it for personal budgeting.
Modifiable categories
No setup work is necessary to start budgeting with OOTD right away, all you have to do is start plugging your relevant figures into the ready made budget columns, one for your master budget plan on the left, and one for your monthly actual amounts tracking next to it on the right. These budget columns offer a rich set of income and expense categories that should in most cases provide all that you need right out of the box, however, should you find that you require categories that are not there, all the categories are modifiable so that you may change the category name and associated pop-up description text to suit your special budgeting needs.
In-Field math
The OOTD In-Field math feature is like having a calculator built in every budget category field. It allows you to use the math operators for addition, subtraction, multiplication and division (+, -, *, /) right inside the field, so if say you have an amount of 117 as your current restaurants spending, and you spent 46 last night, in your budget field that shows currently 117, you can just type next to it +46 as in 117+46, and as soon as you click the Save button, the result is calculated for you and placed as the new amount in that field. No need to do the calculation yourself and it saves you time too.
Cash Put-Aside Manager
OOTD's Cash Put-Aside Manager (C-PAM) is an innovative tool built into your budget that makes designating cash amounts to put aside each month for annual expenditures like home/car insurance, as easy as a few mouse clicks. With built in automation, easy and fast tracking, and e-mail notes to remind you to actually put aside the cash in your bank, the system is literally doing the good work for you.
Money Bucket Accounts
While budgeting is the starting point for personal financial health and is a core feature of the OOTD utility, more controlling power over cash can be realized via transactional based accounts which are very useful for organizing and tracking amounts of cash that you put aside for savings or designated expenditures. OOTD Money Bucket Accounts are virtual accounts that are just like any bank cash account only you never have to move money around physically to new places even if you want to manage it jointly with others. These can be used powerfully to manage loans, savings or money pools for designated expenditures. Each Money Bucket Account can be kept and used for as long as you want regardless of closing each month in your budget for expense tracking. Up to 5 accounts may be opened each with unlimited Cash In (deposit) and Cash Out (withdrawal) transactions.
My Money Tree Visualization
My Money Tree visualization is an alternative way to look at your closed budgeting periods in a graphical way using the tree metaphor to depict your financial health, as well as a fun way to get motivated to stick with budgeting month after month and take the bore out of the chore.
Month End Reports
One mouse click can send a report of your current budget and monthly actual columns together with all your bottom line totals, to your e-mail where you can keep your snapshots from every month end for your record keeping, review and further analysis using other tools like Excel where your summarized analytical products are limited by your imagination only. This also allows you to close your month on your OOTD monthly cash tracking green column, and free the column for the new month while the previous month is saved in your e-mail.
E-mail reminder and a personal Notepad
A built in notepad for jotting down and storing your notes plus an easy to set end of month e-mail reminder are as far as a mouse click. The e-mail reminder is handy when you want to make sure that you do not forget to update and close your monthly budget by the end of the month and start the new month in a timely manner. You can set your e-mail reminder to any day of the month with a text message of your choice and you may change it as often as you wish.
Secure browsing
While user accounts at OOTD do not require personal identity and bank accounts information to ensure that these can never be exposed through usage of the OOTD budgeting website, an additional security layer is also available to protect login access information by using the internet standard SSL secure pages protocol for all account access activities such as account creation, logins and password maintenance. To learn more about privacy, safety and security at the OOTD website you can read this page
Self Serve Account Cancellation
Got in and found out it's not what you need?
Or maybe used OOTD happily but no longer need it?
Whatever your reason is for canceling your OOTD account, forget about the hassle of having to contact and request account cancellation, you can do it yourself anytime you want by choosing this option from the menu bar. When you cancel your account, your entire budget record is permanently erased from the database without leaving a trace behind.
What users are saying about OOTD?
The best place to find what OOTD users are saying about using this online utility, is the free and open OOTD users billboard where users converse with other users and the developer too. The users billboard is available from the footer of any OOTD page including this one.
Lyn Bell from Sound Finance gave OOTD high marks and said "This is a great free program and perfect if you want clarity, ease of use and an understanding of your financial situation."
Lyn Bell is a respected professional in the financial industry with a robust experience in the areas of personal and corporate finances.
You can read her complete review on this page.
GradView.com suggests Out Of The Dark as the budgeting tool of choice for grads saying Out of the Dark allows you to anonymously enter your income and expenses and track your spending, and you can access your information from any computer at any time. Remember, learning to budget now can save you from years of debt later.
You can view the entire page here.
CollegePulse.net recommends OOTD as one excellent free online money management resource for students and lists OOTD as a must have link along side the likes of Google Docs, Mozilla Firefox and other web darlings.
You can view the entire page here.
Are you new to budgeting?
OOTD was developed for both experienced and inexperienced budgeters. If you are new to budgeting, a good place for you to start is this blog page or if you want to know some more about the origins of Out Of The Dark (OOTD), you can read this blog page.
Want to start the kids off early on a healthy financial path?
The web is full of interesting articles on how beneficial it is to start the young ones early on with budgeting and other sound financial habits and practices that are likely to stay with them for life. It is also known that in this day and age youngsters take naturally to the latest technologies such as computers and the Internet. OOTD budgeting is not only simple and easy for our kids to use, but it also speaks the language that they are most comfortable with, the language of the web, and as such it is the perfect tool to get our kids started young with budgeting. If they are old enough to be on facebook, they are ready for OOTD too.
