Managing my personal finances has become something of a hobby for me, something I spend at least a few hours a week paying attention to. As a result, my household’s financial health has gotten a lot better.
But like any hobby, it’s tempting to keep playing and tweaking and upgrading my toys. For the past six months or so, I’ve been using Wesabe to manage my finances. It’s gotten progressively more annoying. A few months ago, they overhauled their user interface to make it more like Mint. I hate Mint, so ever since, I’ve been looking for a new personal finance program. In a vague sort of way.
This weekend, I got serious about switching and started working my way through Get Rich Slowly’s list of personal finance software options. I’ve taken six programs for a test drive in the past two days, discounting several others because I’d tried them in the past or they’re not supported on my Mac, etc.
Here’s what I was looking for:
- easy to use – I need to be able to quickly find all the information I might want about what I’m spending in a given category or what bills I have coming up, etc.
- automatic – I want the software to automatically import data from all my accounts, without a lot of fuss and bother from me. I’d also like it to be fairly competent at putting those imports into the right categories. This one is complicated, because I use a small bank. Most software programs aren’t able to download from it, but a few are.
- customizable – I need to be able to make my own categories, and set up my own budget goals.
- free – there are so many free programs out there, I hoped to find one that met my needs. This whole project is about saving me money, right?
- fun – this is, as I mentioned, something of a hobby for me. Hobbies should be fun! I’d like something that feels good to use and offers some extras like community boards or finance tips.
After a full weekend of playing with different programs, I think I’ve settled on Quicken Online. It’s not that it does any of the things I wanted best: I like Moneywell’s interface a lot more – it was slick, easy to use and fun. But it did not do the automatic data imports I wanted, and it costs $50. I liked how easy Moneystrands was to set up, but found its interface terminally annoying once I’d uploaded my data. I chose Quicken because it was the only one that did everything I wanted in a basically competent way.
Do you have a favorite personal finance program? What do you love about it?
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