Beating Broke

Personal Finance from the Broke Perspective

Looking for New Personal Finance Software

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Several things have happened recently that have made me decide that it’s time to upgrade the way I track my finances.  First, the software I currently use (Microsoft Money 2006) is no longer supported.  At some point it’s not going to work anymore.  Not for a while, but that combined with other factors says it needs to be replaced.  Second, currently we track our check register in Money and then transfer the info into a spreadsheet for our budget.  It’s somewhat archaic. Finally, it’s cumbersome and time consuming.  I’d like something that is all-in-one and that I can enter my register stuff in while categorizing it on the fly and that I can then click over and see the effect on budget and so on.

The software that I’m currently looking at and will likely demo is YNAB (You Need a Budget), MoneyDance, and Quicken.  I’ve looked briefly at GNUCash and I’ve used Quickbooks before, but both are pretty heavy duty accounting software and the object here is to simplify, not have to learn proper double entry accounting procedures.  So far, the front-runner is YNAB.  But, I haven’t tested any of them yet so I only have the online sites to go off of.  Which brings me to the online options.  I think they are out.  Some are very robust, but none of them will automatically bring in my information, and I have no need for access to it from anywhere, so it just seems like an added privacy risk that I don’t need to take.

Now, here’s where all you readers come in.  I want to know what you use.  What do you recommend?  And what options/features have you found to be “can’t live without” in your software.

Money Management Software Changes

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As you’ve probably gathered, I’m a bit of a budget enthusiast here.  It’s a budget that got our finances back on track and it’s a budget that keeps them headed in the right direction.  Our budget tells us when we’ve overspent and helps us adjust to bring us back to balance when we have overspent.  For our budgeting purposes, we have a pretty simple excel-like worksheet that has our income broken down, and has our expenditures broken into categories.  We don’t get super-duper detailed, but it has enough detail that we know when we’re running low on budgeted funds for something.

For years, I’ve used a copy of MS Money to do our check register keeping.  For some time, I even tracked our retirement portfolios in detail.  I still use MS Money, but it’s recently been dropped from the Microsoft list of current software.  They aren’t going to make any more versions, and they are ending the support for it at some point.  So, at some point, we’ll need to switch to a newer software and from a new vendor. There are several choices.  Quickbooks is a business favorite, but I feel that it’s a bit too much for our personal records.  GnuCash is a free software, but is very similar to Quickbooks and for the same reasons would be a bit of an overkill.  The most likely choice is Quicken by Intuit.  But what version?

My first thought was to try and use Mint.com.  They were purchased by Intuit and the service was integrated with and finally replaced the Quicken Online that they offered.  The nice thing about Mint.com is that it’s free, and it’s online so you can access it from anywhere.  The service connects to all of your accounts and updates them for you.  They’ve got some pretty nice tools.  A budget calculator, and a nice budget worksheet that really are nice.  I might still give the service a try, but it can’t connect to my local Credit Union account, so I’d still have to enter a lot of the stuff manually.

And, if I have to enter stuff manually, I will likely end up purchasing something like Quicken Premier and utilizing it’s more robust feature set to do reporting and tracking of investments and such.  Another pro for having the actual software is that I have control over where my info is and can easily backup my files.  I’m sure that Mint is very secure, but I still get a bit leery about having one place that has that much access to all of my financial data.

What about you?  What software am I missing?  What do you use?  I don’t mind being proven wrong, if there’s a better software out there, let me know!

Disclaimer: The links in this post are a mix of affiliate links and paid links.  Neither of those facts changed the content of this post and the thoughts are mine and mine alone.

Quicken 2009 Available, Get 25% Off

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In case you hadn’t heard, the newest versions of the Quicken Personal Finance Softwares are now available.  As an affiliate of Quicken, I get the ability to offer you a discount on several of their titles.

  • Quicken 2009 Deluxe gets a 25% discount.  That takes it down to $44.99 instead of $59.99
  • Quicken 2009 Premier gets a 20% discount, for $71.99 instead of $89.99
  • Quicken 2009 Home & Business gets a 20% discount, bringing it down to $79.99 instead of $99.99
  • Quicken 2009 Rental Property Manager gets a 20% discount, $119.99 instead of $149.99
  • Quicken 2009 Home Inventory Manager also gets a 20% discount, $23.99 instead of $29.99
  • Quicken Willmaker  Plus is marked down to $39.99 from it’s normal $79.99
  • and they are apparently taking sign ups for Quicken Financial Life for Mac


Some Pretty good deals.  You can visit the Quicken 2009 store and take advantage of those discounts.  I’m not sure how long they’ll last, but by the time they are over, you ought to be able to pick the titles up on eBay for about the same as with the discount.  Of course, I’ll appreciate any affiliate commissions that I get a lot more than eBay will. 😉