Data & Privacy
What Budget stores
Budget stores the following data associated with your account:
- Budget accounts — names, types, and opening balances you enter
- Transactions — date, payee, amount, category, memo, and status (cleared/reconciled)
- Bank connections — Plaid access tokens used to sync your transactions (not your banking credentials)
- Categories and groups — your budget structure, assigned amounts, and goals
- Tracking accounts — manually entered assets and liabilities (home value, 401k, vehicles, real estate, etc.) and their update history
- Investment holdings — ticker symbol, share count, cost basis, and manually entered current price for each holding in tracked investment accounts
- Vehicle metadata — purchase price and purchase date used to estimate depreciation
- Real estate metadata — address and purchase date stored alongside manual value updates
- Scheduled transactions — recurring bills and their next occurrence dates
- Payee rules — learned mappings from payee name to category (built up as you confirm transactions)
- Milestones — named net worth targets and their completion dates
What Budget does not store
- Your banking username or password — these go directly to Plaid and never reach Budget
- Social Security numbers, account numbers, or routing numbers
- Real-time brokerage data or live market prices (investment prices are entered manually)
Bank connection security
Bank connections are powered by Plaid (opens in a new tab). When you link a bank account, your credentials are entered into Plaid's interface directly — Budget receives only an access token, which it uses to request transaction data on your behalf. You can revoke this access at any time from Settings → Bank Connections → Remove.
Your data
Your financial data belongs to you. Budget does not sell, share, or use your data for advertising or third-party purposes.
Data export and account deletion tools are available — contact support for assistance.