Personal Finances Software Suggestion
Wednesday, February 20th, 2008 - 1:40pm
I'm about to make my yearly TurboTax purchase and realize I totally suck at my day-to-day financial planning. I'm upset at my ignorance of my monthly expenditure and the general lack of budgeting.
I'm 32 yr old professional, married with 2 toddlers, own a house with minimum investment (401K). I just sort of want to track my expenses and make sure I'm not overspending, and it'd be nice to check out where my money went from time-to-time. Real simple stuff.
A lot of people could probably do all this in their head, but i tried yesterday with paper and pencil and got a huge headache. Quicken and Microsoft Money seem to be the most popular programs out there. Any suggestions?
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We purchased Quicken 2007 last year, and I like it very much.
If your bank supports the new formats (no more QIF downloads, all online "streaming" stuff now) and online bill pay, then it is awesome.
I believe the notes on 2008 say that it improved the reporting/budgeting functions, but I already found them adequate.
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I like GNUCash, and it appears its finally available on windows. It has a lot of features I've never used and can't comment on, but is great for just keeping track of where my money actually goes.
private String paula = "Brillant";
GNUCash is an excellent piece of software, and much more flexible then Quicken. Plus, it's free, so you can try it out to see if you like it. There was a thread comparing features in more detail, I'll see if I can track it down.
Kat on Cally wrote:
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I only dabbled in Money 2007, but it seemed to be missing a few things. It kept on talking about how it would autoupdate if I gave it my login data for my bank accounts, but probably for 2/3 of them it kept giving me this opaque error message. And it was a lot more expensive than free.
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I've been using Quicken for the last 4 years, and have not had any complaints. For me at least, it does a great job keeping track and categorizing my expenses.
In fact, I sometimes think it does too good of a job. I usually dread checking what percentage, of my total expenses, is made up of just entertainment expenses.
LiquidMantis wrote:
I am using Excel, with a couple of formulas it is enough for me to track my expenses. I am no expert at using the tool, so if you have some knowledge it can be another option.