What is Out Of The Dark (OOTD)?
Explanation and main features
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?"
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.
Whether you are a starving student or a high flying executive, the basic principle of good personal finance and budgeting is 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.
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 financing 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.
Using OOTD is simple, easy, quick and free
No need to install and learn a new software, no need to carry and read manuals, 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 to come back to and make any changes any time and never be in the dark with where your money is.
Want to save and keep your monthly budget before you start a new month? One click sends a monthly report to your e-mail for safe keeping.
Modifiable categories
No setup work is necessary to start budgeting with OOTD, all you have to do is start plugging your relevant figures into the ready made budget columns, one for your master budget on the left, and one for your monthly actual amounts 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 build 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.
Money Bucket Accounts
One of the benefits from good budgeting is having more disposable cash, for which transactional based account management can be very useful for organizing and tracking any set amount of cash that you put aside for saving or any designated expenditure. OOTD Money Bucket Accounts are virtual accounts that are just like any bank cash accounts 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. Up to 5 accounts may be opened each with unlimited Cash In (deposit) and Cash Out (withdrawal) transactions.
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 actual amount column, and free the column for the new month while the previous month is saved in your e-mail.
Personal Notepad and e-mail reminder
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 can be quite 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.
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.
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.