Tomorrow I’ll be participating in a brainstorming session about online personal finance tools. The people behind this workshop want to know what the average person is looking for when she chooses a tool to manage her money. I promised to poll GRS readers for suggestions.
How I manage my money
For years, I’ve used Quicken to manage my money, both on Mac and PC. I’m using the Mac version now, and it’s way behind its PC cousin. The program has all the features I need to track my bank accounts, my investment accounts, and my business ventures, but these features are difficult to find and use, mired by a lousy interface.
Though I like the idea of an online personal finance tool, in practice I find they have too many barriers for me:
- They take too long to set up.
- They have limited functionality.
- They have annoying interface quirks.
For me to move to an online tool, it would have to offer fuss-free setup, not have a subscription-based income model (I’d rather pay a one-time fee), allow me to customize my transactions, and be able to track investments. I don’t really care about social networking stuff. I’m not that eager to compare my expenses with everybody else.
Meanwhile, I’m gradually moving to a paperless personal finance system. I’ve automated as many transactions as possible. I scan every important document that comes my way. I make regular backups of my data. I’d certainly give serious consideration to a tool that helped with this.
How you manage your money
How do you manage your money? What strategies do you use? What tools have you tried? What are you currently using? Do you manage your money on your computer with Excel, Quicken, or Microsoft Money? Do you manage it online with Wesabe, Mint, or Expensr?
What are the top three things you want out of a personal finance tool or service? Do you want to be able to budget? Connect to your investment account? Discuss money management with other users?
Finally, what are your biggest personal finance challenges? Becoming debt-free? Learning how to invest? Finding money to save? Resisting the temptation to spend?
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I use Quicken (mac) as a check register and keep track of my bank balances. I’ve never really learned about the other features. I haven’t had any investments until this week, so I might try to learn about that part of Quicken.
In addition, I use an Excel spreadsheet to track all transactions in a monthly-budget form (including CC transactions), so that I always know how much money I have left in the monthly budget, not just in my bank account or credit card. I also track my monthly savings here.
I did try Quicken Online, but when it marked every single debit card transaction (most of them) as POS/Check Card instead of going further like my bank does and adding the description (where I can figure out where the transaction was made), it became far too irritating and I quickly cancelled my account.
I would love to move both my check register (and investment tracking) and my Excel budget online. I was using Google Docs for the spreadsheet, but I have to design it on my home computer and then upload it to Google (to get all the details right just how I like them). And on this version of my budget, when I upload it, Google docs screws up the formatting. So lazily I have left the spreadsheet at home.
Will be interested to see what your post turns up, JD!
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I use Quicken which I find helpful for tracking our expenses. However, the Quicken budgeting tool has been a complete failure for us and Quicken up-keep is time intensive.
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I’m currently trying out both Quicken Online and Pearbudget. However, the most useful tools I use are spreadsheets I’ve created for myself.
Top 3 things I want to see:
* Importing: Automatic import of transactions from all of my accounts (banking and investment). I like the way Quicken Online imports and categorizes transactions, but it currently doesn’t handle my 401k.
* Budget tracking: So far I love the way Pearbudget handles this, but the fact that it has no automatic import is a problem.
* Bill pay: I haven’t seen this in either of the tools I’ve tried, but right now the only reason I’m logging into my bank’s online banking is to do bill pay and transfers. If I could do this from my personal finance tools instead, it would be great.
My biggest personal finance challenges are to resist my own temptations to impulse spend, and to convince my wife of the importance of sound personal finance (spend less than you earn, save for retirement, remain debt-free, etc).
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As a newbie to the whole financial responsibility thing, I’m still working out my system. Right now, I’ve created an Excel budget sheet and use my online banking tools. Bank of America allows you to create a budget in your online account and has some nice features with charts, etc.
An online tool would be great so that I could access it from work or home, but it would need to be easily customized. I’m working to get out of debt so it would be helpful to me to have access to discussion forums or help tips.
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We, family of 6, use atm debit cards with auto bill pay for fixed monthly expenses like mort, auto ins, phone, and etc. Also, use debit card for gas cause we can’t go in store and leave kids in car. The rest is cash for groceries, clothes, eating out, and other incidentals. Don’t use rewards cards and like the reduced risk of credit fraud among other benefits of cash. We tried quicken but quit after a month and stick to excel spreadsheets for budget, net worth, and other incidental tracking like how we spend the federal tax stimulus rebate. It took about three years of trial and error to get to a plan that was workable for us.
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I have used Microsoft Money for eons. I use it primarily as a check register, and love it for that purpose. I can always balance my account. (I could never do so on paper.) I also love being able to download my statement instead of having to enter transactions manually. I hate how intensive the newer versions of Money are. If my bank would support MSMoney 1998, I’d go back to it in a second.
I also use a Palm-based register system to track cash and credit card purchases. This program interfaces (though not very easily) with MSMoney.
I’ve never quite gotten the hang of using Money to track my retirement accounts, etc.
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I would highly, highly recommend a service I used daily called yodlee.com. As an account aggregator it does everything you need.
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I never got use to quicken. I use an excel spreasheet. i have inputted everything into mint.com and am trying that. it is nice to be able to look up all accounts on one site. i have the capability to save most accounts at say bank of america, but it doesn’t allow for what it thinks are duplicate accounts–that is, since my wife and i have indiv accounts at the same bank, it won’t allow both. mint.com does. the interface is easy. not all expenses are categorized necessarily correctly, but for the most part, i like it although i won’t be scrapping my excel spreadsheet anytime soon. i’ve customized the spreadsheet to fit all my needs, so it is hard to use anything else.
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I’m a longtime Quicken for Mac user (since the early 1990s) and have no complaints. It works for my purposes, but I don’t use most of its more complex features; it works fine as a basic accounting tool.
My main hesitations about using an online service are:
1. What happens if the provider goes out of business? I’d have to be confident that there’s a way to export my data in a format that would be useable by other programs (such as Excel or Quicken) and keep it on my own computer.
2. Subscription fees: Like JD, I don’t like these. If you use just one or two online services, the subscription fees aren’t a big deal. But as more software and services move to the online model, those subscription fees can nickel and dime you to death. The firm 37signals, which is one of the leaders in online subscription-based tools (Basecamp, Campfire, Backpack, Highrise) has been seeing complaints about this from customers who subscribe to multiple services.
3. Security. Even though Wesabe and others are confident that the financial data of their subscribers is secure, I still think a lot of people (myself included) are reluctant to put their financial info online.
The ideal money management solution for me would be a non-proprietary tool that runs on my own computer, using a program like Excel (or Apple’s Numbers) that I can be confident will stick around and will not force me to upgrade every couple of years.
Other thoughts: One of the most attractive features for me is to be able to receive and pay all my bills through one interface. I was able to do something like that when Quicken directly connected to my bank, and it made everything much easier — I could reconcile my bank account in a couple of minutes, pay my bills in a snap…it was great! My current bank doesn’t have that capability so I have to enter everything manually in Quicken. I actually don’t mind that so much as I feel more in touch with my finances because entering data by hand forces me to pay more attention, but it is a lot less convenient. For me, the online banking functionality is the main selling point for a program such as Quicken.
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For day-to-day management I use Quicken2006 running on a PC and have been using Quicken releases since 1986. Using scheduled payment function each month is loaded in two installments that coincide on paydays. I have been ebanking through my credit union since 1994. Direct deposit is mandatory where I work, automatic distribution to my accounts, my wife’s checking and savings. I have more than 70% of regular payments on either draft or scheduled release. Investment portfolios are all online and receive only e-statements. Finally I have been using Insurance Information Institute’s terrific “Know your stuff” for household inventory and that allows storing scanned sales receipts with the inventory. I do keep a full-picture budget spreadsheet on Excel that I compare Quicken reports to projected budget expenditures at the end of each year, but I don’t really think it is worth the extra work now.
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I have a very simple and very successful strategy for keeping track of my money, no software required. I keep a money journal in a notebook, writing down every penny that comes in or goes out. I write myself notes and make plans for paying bills and encourage myself to be more frugal–all right in the same journal. For me, managing my money required first of all a change in attitude toward myself. On the front of my money journal, I pasted a picture of a Victorian family in all their finery, posing solemnly for the camera. I wrote under the photo, “We have enough. We are enough. We do enough.” Then I pretended that I was a member of that family. I realized that I don’t need to keep buying to be “enough.” I, myself, am already quite sufficient. Once I truly felt this, I was able to stop shopping and spending for entertainment and giving elaborate gifts to hopefully make people like me or be grateful to me. All my relationships as well as my budget have benefited from this change. And all it takes is a notebook and a pen!
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This probably isn’t the kind of answer you’re looking for, but we don’t actually use any fancy tools to manage our finances. We don’t keep a checkbook or track every penny.
We have an Excel spreadsheet for our annual budget. Once a year, we list our monthly salaries at the top, then list off all our various expenses. We review past bank statements (online) and determine what our monthly costs our for regular recurring expenses (phone, cable, water, gas, etc.) and add those to the spreadsheet. If the expenses are more than the salaries, we adjust the variable expenses (gifts, monthly “play” money, etc.). We NEVER reduce the amounts dedicated to retirement savings. Those are considered inflexible.
Anyway, we try to have a small ($300 or so) surplus in the monthly budget to cover any miscalculations or surprises.
Then we forget about it.
When a bill comes, we pay it. We don’t update any software or anything, because we already know that our monthly incomes can cover all the expected expenses. We have our “play” money that we can spend each month on whatever we want (entertainment, travel, whatever), but we never touch the money in the account except for bills listed in the budget. Everything works out.
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Online banking for paying bills and tracking other accounts (ie. savings, CDs, Mortgage, auto loan, etc.). Old fashion Pen and paper for budget and keeping my checkbook balance. I try not to write things twice. I enjoy this blog and am looking forward to reading more of the comments.
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I am boring and just a variety of methods. I use my good old checkbook and I use Google Documents to set up my budget and keep an idea of how everything is doing. I like it b/c it’s free and I can access it anywhere.
I also track my purchases on my Palm.
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I’ve just started really tracking my expences, I’m new to the whole fiscal responsibility thing. I wanted a online tool to track my expences, I also wanted it to be available from my cell phone, so I could check a budget category to see if I had money.
Buxfer (http://www.buxfer.com) to the rescue. Web 2.0 coolness, auto sync from my bank account, auto tagging of expences, budgets and categories, txt and email alerts. It’s cool. A month in and I’m digging it.
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I tried switching to one of the older computer programs (Quicken I think) but I have been using paper and pencil for years now and am comfortable with that method.
I know that it is ancient. AT least the final results are easy to read because I will use red, green, or black ink depending on the entry type.
I print out a blank spread sheet every two weeks and fill in the rows with each debt and deposit.
I break my paper records in to HouseHold (all the day to day plus yearly; e.g., car insureance, expenses); Retirement accounts, Taxable accounts, and other (safe deposit box, cash on hand etc.).
It works for me and forces me to know where my money is going. True adding up the various columns by hand does led to some errors but it is not that difficult.
My biggest goal is early retirement (at age 49 1/2) which will happen in 7 years.
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We use Quicken on the PC.
As far as online services, as a computer guy who has worked as a computer security analyst, I’m a bit nervous about putting all of my financial information in one spot.
Let’s just say I know the “sins” of the security realm. The thing to keep in mind is that, much like finances, it’s a game of managed risks. Your vendors are doing their best to keep your information safe because they know it is central to their business.
However, they have to balance security with other business requirements. For instance, most people want easy access to their information without having to use “special magic”. “Special magic” technologies are enormously expensive and hard to use. But from a security standpoint, the “special magic” technologies are the best. These things include two-factor authentication (similar in concept to ATM cards, with a PIN). They are hard and expensive to manage on a large scale.
And, authentication is only 1 part of the 7 areas of security that need to be managed.
[Addendum: I'm not trying to dissuade you from using these services, but it is good to know some of the risks up front when you do. I am tempted to use them but I don't think I will in the near term.]
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I’m old school – nothing beats a custom Microsoft Excel spreadsheet for my purposes. I have a workbook with ten or so tabs that I’ve designed including a checking ledger, retirement tracker, cash & investment tracker, networth calculator, etc. I have it stored on an encrypted flash drive and back it up once a week or so. No account numbers, nothing personalized that anyone could use to identify the person behind the numbers.
I am hesitant to input anything online that requires account number entry. I figure no one is as protective of my data as I am. I would not be against using something that I updated manually, however that sort of defeats the purpose of building an online interface to show real-time balances.
If I were to eventually move online I would love to see a system that uses a pin or some other non-descript account identifier rather than a password or account number for each financial institution. Of course, this would all have to be coordinated with the institutions, but it would be nice if I could enter something like, “542322fd” and it translate to my savings account at the Bank of Frugal. This way, there is no risk of sharing my account number, my online banking password, or any personal information associated with my account. I’ve yet to try an online application that didn’t ask for at least one of those to “connect” to my bank accounts.
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Online bill pay, automatic transfers into 401K, Roth, etc but for daily expenses I use an old fashioned ledger. I write it all down by hand…
Personal issues: We’re out of consumer debt and student loan debt and have been for awhile…so now we just have mortgage debt (for our house and a piece of property we own adjacent to it) but I find it very hard to send extra money toward it when it seems so big in my mind…like it’ll always be there…I’d like to figure out how long it would take us to pay it off…i.e. 500 extra a month would be X number of years or 200 extra a month would be this many years.
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I started using mint about 2 months ago, and I really don’t like it. It’s aimed at me and my generation, but I would almost rather use a more tedious program than mint because the program is too smart. It should be more intuitive and allow me to break down the expenses the way I want, not the way it thinks I want them.
I need to try out some of the others, but I’m still pretty much dead set on creating my own in excel…
Daniel @ Young and Frugal
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I have been using Microsoft Money for years now and like it well enough not to change to something else. It has some quirks like when it classifies things incorrectly but I think those types of problems are evident in other types of software so it is not a big deal to me.
I also recently started using Mint but I do not rely on it to keep my finances in order.
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When I first set out to organize my finances I looked at a lot of different tools like MS Money, Quicken, GNU Cash, and some of the online tools. Unfortunately, none of them were offering quite what I was looking for so, being the geek that I am, I just put it together in Excel. It took me a LOT longer to setup, but improving it gradually over the years is a process that I’ve enjoyed. I have one tab to put in expenses & income (either manual entry or downloaded from my bank or credit card website), one tab to track net worth, one tab to track the cash flow in my chequing account, and one tab which sums all the individual expenses up and shows actual spending vs budget amount for each category in my budget. I’ve also added a few graphs and such so I can easily see where my money is being spent.
I realize that this isn’t for everyone because the setup time is so high. Being a software developer, this type of thing is appealing to me though. Now that it’s setup, it generally takes about 20 minutes per week to update it and make sure that everything is on track.
I can’t really see myself ever moving to an online tool. I’m much more comfortable and familiar with Excel so I don’t think they’d be any easier to use. The only benefit that I can see is that I’d be able to access it anywhere, but I’m not sure that’s really something I need or want.
Basically, I don’t see any problem that is solved by switching to an online tool.
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I use Moneydance. It’s cheaper than Quicken and is cross platform. It also doesnt throw a bunch of ads in your face when you are trying to cncentrate on saving money.
I also really like how it can directly download my transactions from my bank! Not a lot of Finanace programs can do that.
Even better, unlike Quicken, the people at Moneydance are resposive when you email them. It’s not like shooting an email ino the void.
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I use an excel spreadsheet to track, online bill pay through my bank to pay.
One thing I’ve never found in money management software is the ability to take my paycheck (when it’s received) and then disperse it into different “accounts” (really budget categories). Then purchases are deducted against the account. I really want to know at a glance how much money I have in my grocery fund, not what my checking account balance is. Does anyone have experience with an app that will give me something like this? My excel spreadsheet works fine, but it could be better (I may write my own app one of these days).
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I am a long-time Quicken user and rely on it heavily to manage all my savings and investment accounts. The budgeting piece isn’t that great, so I have my own spreed sheet. I love the look of Mint, but I am just not comfortable storing my whole financial life out there off my own pc. Its so personal I’d really be worried about security. I’m already being issued a new credit card due to a sercurity breach with a grocery store.
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I’ve used MS Money for probably 10 years now, mostly because it was included in the standard s/w pack that came with my PC(s). Probably unlike most people, I love tracking our expenses, so that I can find *where* our money is going and also track our overall networth as it changes over time. It’s also really handy at tax time when you can sort out what you’ve paid to charities, etc.
For budgeting, I find nothing beats an Excel sheet.
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Ah, one of my favorite topics.
I use two main tools: Quicken and Excel on my Mac, with the data on an encrypted disk image. (I don’t use Quicken’s or Excel’s password protection, because it’s probably not as good as what Apple uses on disk images.
In Quicken, I track all of my deposit and credit accounts: savings, checking, car loan, college loan, mortgages, credit cards, escrow (I did this even before I was escrowing for myself), IRAs, flexible benefits (FSA), PayPal, money loaned out (or pending rebates on purchases made), etc.
JD, you’re right that the Mac version of Quicken is WAY BEHIND its Windows cousin: I find that Quicken’s budget features are lacking, and that’s why I use Excel. I have several spreadsheets that I use, and I will describe those in a moment.
I have multiple checking accounts – one for billpay (at ING Direct, and into which my direct deposit goes), and one for monthly expenses (at a local credit union, and the only one for which I use debit cards). The reason for this separation is that any problems in my debit account will not affect any billpay activities – that is, my mortgage payment will never bounce because of illegitimate charges to my debit card.
I have the following Excel workbooks, each of which I will describe briefly, and will supply more details upon request:
- primary spreadsheet: this wraps everything together, and is where I track my monthly budget. It shows my expenses as well, so I can predict where I will be in the coming months. Originally this was created to give me an exact figure I could send to credit card companies (when I was getting out of CC debt) yet still have money at the end of the month (I didn’t want to send them too much money, and then not be able to pay something else off)
- monthly spending checking account: this has one sheet per category in the monthly spending account. The sheets are simply ledgers, one sheet per category. There is a summary sheet in the workbook that gives me an at-a-glance view of how I am doing for the month
- Escrow account – similar to the monthly spending account, with a summary page and one page per escrowed category (homeowner’s insurance, HOA dues, auto tax, property tax, etc)
- Savings account – similar to the monthly spending account, with a summary page and one page per savings category (emergency fund, etc)
- Fuel economy workbook – one sheet per car; the real reason I have this is because I’m Type A, but it has practical benefits too: I can predict with very good accuracy when my car will hit the mileage for its next service; this helps me escrow properly for auto service needs.
- medical reimbursement workbook – this is used to track my EOBs and FSA expenses (I can’t submit for FSA reimbursement until insurance has paid me, so I track the status of the claims)
On billpay: I pay nearly everything through ING Direct’s billpay feature. Like the next commenter, I prefer PUSH billpay to PULL billpay. Here’s my setup:
- charity: handwritten check
- cable, gas, electricity, trash: all done by push from ING
- cellphone: paid manually with CC
- mortgages: automatic push from ING
- escrows: automatic transfer at ING
- local phone: automatic CC payment
- NetFlix: automatic CC payment (when we had it)
- college loan: automatic PULL from ING by creditor
- insurance: automatic PULL from ING by insurer
I am happy to provide any more details about my system, if anyone is interested.
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My biggest personal finance challenge is spending money on myself. I am so dedicated to getting out of debt and taking care of the other things that I need to do that I neglect spending money on myself – I neglect enjoying my money. I have about $500 in Christmas money that I have yet to spend – why?? I don’t know…
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I started out with a DIY Excel spreadsheet that tracked all my expenses (categorized by type) and catalogued all my debts and savings … that really helped me get a sense of where my money went. I did it on Google Docs so that my husband and I could access it from work. Because it was just a record, not including any account numbers, I wasn’t concerned with that info leaking out (who cares how much I spend on groceries?).
I am currently using AceMoney to track expenses. It has some benefits over my Excel spreadsheet (I can more easily tell if I have miscalculated something, for instance, because it handles tracking of expenses across debit, credit and cash accounts) but even though it’s got fancy reports, I think I found my ad-hoc Excel sheet more clear about whether I was on track to meet my goals. I have tried a number of online tools, and Microsoft Money, in the past but found they overcomplicated things. I spent too much time tweaking the system and not enough time analyzing the data.
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Quicken on the PC. We download transactions and reconcile everything once a week or so. We use Quicken to track, categorize, and review spending. We’re not budgeters; we’re trimmers and adjusters.
Once every month or two, we look at where the money’s going and adjust plans accordingly. About every 6-12 months, we talk about what we want to be doing in the Big Picture and the Long Term.
I pay bills online as much as I can. PUSH ONLY — in other words, I must initiate the transaction. No autopay. We probably write about 8 checks/month.
As for our goals, we are debt-free (except for mortgage), have college savings for the kids set aside, are maxing out retirement savings, and trying to start a rental real estate empire.
DH is a stay-at-home dad, so “buying him” a flexible part-time job that halves our housing costs, gives us another income stream, and (hopefully) takes advantage of the current real-estate market seems like a reasonable risk to take now.
Our ideal lifestyle would be to each work 20-30 hours/week and make enough to have adequate insurance and keep saving. DH has been “semi-retired” as a SAHD with our two kids for more than 6 years while I work full time, and we have about $850k net worth (married with slightly negative numbers 14 years ago). We’re slowly, slowly moving in that direction!
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Pen, Paper and an accordian file.
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Like HollyP, I have been using Microsoft Money since the 90s. Overall I like it, but it has grown very cumbersome during the last few years. It takes forever to open (at least 20 minutes) and it doesn’t automatically update my accounts anymore, I have to do it manually. I wish I could go back to an old version too.
I use most of the tools in Money: the check register, the budget tool, the reports, etc.
I recently signed up for Quicken Online and I really love that I can have all my accounts in one place and check my balances from anywhere… but I was expecting more. Like bill pay, a budget tool, and better reporting.
If I could find an online service that had most of the features of Money, that would be ideal. I wouldn’t even mind paying a subscription fee, as long as it was reasonable.
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I have online banking set up for all of my accounts (Check and Savings at ING, Credit cards at Citibank and Bank of America). I then manage all of my spending via my Excel spreadsheet you featured about a month ago.
I base my purchasing decisions largely on the excel spreadsheet. It doesn’t, however, follow my bank account balances (which is on purpose), so I check my account balance every few days and make sure things are all ok. On the 1st of each month I transfer any extra money in my checking account over what is budgeted for the month to my savings account, for some forced savings.
Works well for me
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Mark up another tally for buxfer.com for me. I find that since I can text in my purchases w/ tags, that I’m actually able to keep a better log of what I spend. I pretty much force myself to log (either by text msg or online) all purchases as soon as I make them. So far, this has helped me eliminate the big pile of receipts and or the “pile which will never be processed”.
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second the use of yodlee.com.
It’s a great site that can bring all your various accounts (investment sites, banks, loans, credit cards, mortgages) together, show you and categorize transactions from all them, graph spending trends, etc. I’ve mostly used Quicken since that was what my CPA mom used, but have been slowly relying more and more on yodlee
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I recently had the same question? Where is the best place to manage your finances online. I did some research and found an article in (I think) the Feb 2008 Money magazine that talked about this. Money Center at moneycenter.yodlee.com, seem to be what everyone is looking for. It seems to be an online version of quicken, but a better interface. It tracks almost any kind of investments, accounts, real estate, insurance. Online bill paying, quick dashboard reports. Spending charts and reports, and budget charts reports. I have used it since Feb and I like it alot and makes tracking my finances a lot easier. Plus it is secure, that was one of the biggest issues that I had. I hope that this helps someone else as much as it has helped me.
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1) Excel file
2) Wachovia Online Bill Pay
3) That’s it
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I use quicken (pc) obsessively. I have my entire finacial life on there and i love fiddling with the planning tool. I would go so far as to suggest using this tool for premarital counciling as it would reveal expectations of everything from spending to kids. I was recently forced to upgrade to 2008, which I was mad about. I considered switching to ms money, but too much time and care had been invested into my plan, and money seemed more flashy than useful. 2008 is a buggy thing, and their customer care has been terrible. On the plus side they now have a envelope system spending and saving feature now that offers a deeper level of obsession (I used to have to do that on excel). The only thing I could wish for now is for a budget that can be updated so that a report showing how you are following a budget does not show the budget change as being retroactive. The savings plan makes that less necessary though.
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Currently I use the “Quicken Deluxe” program for personal finance. It works if you want a basic check register and “net worth” calculator. Quicken Deluxe, for PC, is useful because it allows one to track expenditures that are associated with retirement accounts. For example, my Roth IRA is tracked in Quicken and it tells me the current value of the fund, how much I have put into the fund, and how much I have loss. It does this through a percentage and in actual dollars. Quicken also tracks the stock market, which is convenient. I do not use this feature a lot, but it does work. I will say I am not pleased with Quicken because of the formats used in the newer version. Now that they have changed the file format I unable to have an “automatic update” from my credit union. However, it does work well with ING Direct.
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For me it is all about customization without the fluff, as well as the ability to create different models for my accounts and allocations. The only tool that really does what I need with no mess is Excel.
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I use gnucash for to keep track of my money. I had a tight budget 2 years ago and followed every cent back then, but now I only check my progress once every week or so and not all cash payments are accounted for.
Gnucash might not be the perfect for everyone as it uses double bookkeeping. It took me some time to get used to, but once I figured it out I loved it. As the name implies it started out as a free software program, and it was not available for windows until last year, but now it works well for windows also.
I love gnucash and would recommend it to everyone. I have not tried Quicken or Microsoft Money so I cannot argue about its strengths or weaknesses, but I do not want to spend money on tool to keep track of money.
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I tried Quicken about 10 years ago and didn’t like it. I rolled my own budgeting spreadsheet and have been using (and tailoring and evolving – which is a major benefit of this approach) that ever since. I’ve looked at other people’s budgeting spreadsheets (Pearbudget, et al), and have stuck with my own creation. It serves me well.
Also, I stopped using paper checks many years ago and have a second spreadsheet for my checking account register. I manually balance it online through the bank’s website every week, which isn’t a big hassle because I use cash for most transactions. I also pay 99.999% of my bills through the bank’s site.
Oh, and I also have a small envelope system (thank you Dave Ramsey) in place with 4 categories: clothes, car, pets and toys. Recently I used the latter to save up and pay cash for an Xbox 360. Also just paid cash for a new work wardrobe with plenty of cash left over for some badly-needed shoes (I tend to let things get really worn out before replacing them).
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Hey JD – Like many others here, I’ve been a long-time fan of Quicken and have used the PC version of the software for nearly 10 years. I also keep a couple manual Excel spreadsheets namely for tracking recurring bills and budgeting (as others have mentioned, Quicken budgeting is a little tedious).
I think the biggest thing I want to see out of my software is the ability to quickly and easily pull meaningful reports to observe how I’m spending my money. I’ve always been very satisfied w/ Quicken in this regard.
Finally, most difficult thing: My weakness is eating out for lunch during the workweek, and can easily rack up a couple hundred dollars a month in unnecessary eating out expenses. Ultimately that comes down to naming my eating-out budget, sticking to it, and planning ahead to bring a lunch!
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I am terrible at this. I want to get better but I want a tool that is easy to update. I’ve tried Mint, Wasabe, Yodlee and they are ok. I’d love an application or website that would let me track everything AND pay the bills. Or I’d like a solution for my phone where I can easily enter my purchases. The problem with the web applications is they don’t play nice with mobile browsers.
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I second the recomendation for Yodelee. I don’t use it directly, but I’m nearly certain that it is what powers the “My Portfolio” feature on the Bank of America site. It really is a thing of beauty. Once I’ve registered all my accounts (investment, banking, credit card). I can set up rules to auto-categorize transactions that occur on any account. The transactions themselves are automatically updates, so there’s no import/export/reconciliation from various QIF files. There are a few improvements that I’d like to see, but overall it is great.
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We use MiniMoney on our Mac. We just switched from a PC to a mac, but were using Quicken on the PC. MiniMoney is a free application, is prettier than Quicken and is super simple. We’ve also just started using our bank’s bill pay program (WaMu) and it’s been working out well so far!
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I use Mint to track my spending and create budgets. I found that the budgeting tools in Mint do everything that I need to keep on track every month.
As for paying bills – almost all of them are on autopilot. I have my cable/internet and cell phone bill automatically charged to my credit card each month. At the end of the month, I only have to make my rent, credit card, and electricity payments. I transfer everything else out of my checking account into ING direct (save a little bit for ATM withdrawals the following month) once/month. All in all – I have 4 transactions that I have to worry about making per month…and then I just keep track of my spending on my credit card.
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I guess I’m the only open-source geek here. I use GnuCash and the usual online accounts/bill pay to track spending, loans and retirement accounts for my wife and myself. In addition, I’ll generally track expense categories (dining, etc) on a monthly basis in a spreadsheet.
It has import features for Money and Quicken formats (though I find I have a better idea of what’s going on with my finances if I enter it by hand, rather than importing and checking).
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We use Excel only. I’ve tried Quicken, Mint, and Wesabe. I track everything “by hand” with Excel — opening up the individual accounts and moving stuff around from cell to cell. It can be tedious, but it runs like a well oiled machine.
The top three things I want out of a personal finance tool:
1. flexibility
2. data privacy
3. flexibility
I use Excel because the other systems can be clunky, or put items in places I don’t want them. For example, I can’t automatically track lunch expenses from one restaurant for work or non-work. So some of those programs automatically associate every purchase after I ‘tag’ it once with “work food” or something similar.
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I use MS Money to keep track of individual transactions to my checking account. I tried downloading statements from my bank through Money, but I had trouble getting it to work. So I keep entering every transaction by hand. I find this is better anyway because it forces me to look at what I do instead of blindly downloading things and possibly ignoring them.
Ad for my budget, I like to play around with numbers and categories. I prefer Excel for this because I can write VBA code to make my macros do exactly what I want. It’s highly customizable.
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I’ve been using Microsoft Money for many years now. I usually pay merchants with credit cards and make sure to save the receipts from each transaction. I use these receipts to enter my expenses into Microsoft Money on a nightly basis.
Unlike many people, I don’t use the online features of MS Money. This is very important, because my nightly input to Microsoft money is also a form of review. How much money did i spend? What category? Am I spending too much?
Since I am a college student and my most common expenses are eating out. I like to keep track of this number so that I know when I am getting too close to my budget.
Online and automatic payments are a tad too automated – they don’t demand involvement and it is easy as a person to ignore them
Some features I value highly in a tool are good automatic category suggestions (e.g. If I type Caribou Coffee as the merchant – the tool should automatically choose dining out as the category (or a custom category (coffee) based on my usage patterns) Good reporting functions – this is very useful. Especially any reports that show net-worth or net-expenditures over time, comparative expenses from different months.
Of course I was able to track my accounts from the very beginning. Something I realize is not possible for many people. Under these circumstances the ability to easily import transaction info from banks or credit card companies. One very useful tool would be a pdf importer. That might be able to import and interpret pdf statements.
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