PearBudget is an online budget manager that makes it extraordinarily easy to keep track of your money. The service doesn't link to your bank account, and doesn't import information from Quicken or other desktop accounting software. You actually have to enter your expenses by hand. But this is much, much easier than you'd think.

All you have to do is spend a few minutes when you set up your account entering your typical monthly expenses. And then each time you pay a bill or tally up how much money you spent going out to dinner or a movie, you enter that information. This takes just a moment or two a day, and ensures that you actually think a little bit about how you spend your money every day, which is probably the most useful thing any budget application can do.

PearBudget is not free. There's a 30 day free trial, after which you need to pay $3 per month to use the service, which might seem a bit steep for such simple application. But if you can live without the web interface, there is a free version of PearBudget. The application started its life as a simple but well-organized Excel spreadsheet, which is still available as a free download.

[via Boing Boing]

Tick tracks project time. The best part? It's free! Tick is a simplistic approach to time management. The interface is extremely clean, easy to use, and straightforward which is a major plus, because who really likes spending their time fiddling with entering time? Not me.

Through Tick, you can create projects, assign the projects to a specific client, name the project, and give the specific hourly budget for the project. When this is set, you can create specific tasks for the job, and assign each task with a time limit. When items change in the project, or when time is entered in the reporting section, email notifications are sent. Reporting is laid out by client, with a breakdown of time entered for each specific client project. Filling out time for projects is simple. Choose your date, select your client and specific job you were working on, and drop your time in. Tick also generates a nice little progress bar that graphically displays how much time has been spent on the project in total, and how much time is left from your set hourly budget for the project.

All in all, Tick is a very useful time tracking application. It is a very simple and easy to use online tool used to keep track of your project time, to make sure budgets are hit. Integration through Basecamp is available through the Basecamp API's, which easily link up the two applications. Upon the launch of Tick, packages will be available from free to $79, and will be announced when it is completely launched.

[via Solutionwatch]

Over at Lifehacker they've come up with yet another novel way to manage your finances: Over IM. Adam Pash has written a cool tutorial on how to build an AIM BudgetBot, which makes entering your income and expenses and generating reports as simple as sending an instant message. The BudgetBot is based on a Perl script, which takes some setting up and tweaking, but once it's set up you can add that $150 car repair bill, for example, to your budget just by sending "150 car" to the bot. The coolest thing about it, though, is that once you've got it set up you can send the bot text messages from your cell phone, which means when you're out on the town you can check to see if you can afford those new shoes, and immediately record the purchase before you forget. Head over to Lifehacker to read the tutorial and grab Adam's script.

Winston Huang has written a pair of great extensions for Firefox that help you keep tabs on how many minutes you have left on your mobile phone. They're the Verizon Minutes Used Extension and the TMobile MInutes Used Extension. Each of them shows you right in your status bar how many minutes you've used and how many you have left, and hovering over it will give you more information like a projection of how many minutes you'll use this month. Brilliant!

[Via Lifehacker]