Help me pick some personal finance software

In My Humble Opinion
1

I’ve been married for 12 years, and my wife has done the bills since our wedding. While my wife is fairly tech savvy, she’s been doggedly old school when it comes to checkbook balancing. We were up until 1:30 this morning trying to figure out where she made a $300 mistake. She was very upset and worried, so I offered to take over doing the bills and she agreed. Now I’m looking to get all 21st century on this bi-atch and get some personal finance software.

Before I got married back in 1999, I used Quicken and I… well, I didn’t exactly like it, but it was better than doing it all by hand in the checkbook register. Then again, Quicken was in its infancy and, I presume, a little rough around the edges. Has it matured well in the past 12 years? Is there something better?

I would like a package that integrates with our bank. We are currently with First Midwest Bank in the Chicago suburbs, but we are considering moving to Chase since it is closer to our house and has more branches and ATMs around the Chicago area. Is there any software that will be able to interact with First Midwest or will I have to switch to a bigger bank to get the functionality that I want?

I also have a droid phone. An app to tie into all of this would be great, so that I don’t have to collect all of my receipts every time I use my debit card.

I’ve done a little bit of searching, but Google is mainly giving results on Quicken an their free service, Mint. I’m a bit concerned with the security of online services given what we’ve been seeing with Sony’s Playstation Network hacking and such.

I’m turning to you all because you are the smartest group of people I know and I’ll get more evidence based opinions and less “Quicken ftw” type responses.

2

What functionality do you want, exactly? These days banks (I use Bank of America) offer so many tools and data online, you may not need any separate software. Just depends on what you want to do.

I have used Quicken for many years with very good results for not a lot of money. I do not upgrade every time it nags me to. This last time I upgraded because they dropped support for that version for interaction with online banking. I end dropping $60 maybe every three years.

If I just needed it for my cash accounts I would probably drop it and just use my online banking. I used to use it for budgeting, for which it is quite good, but after years of that we never had any issues with staying on budget so now I just check expenses vs. income a couple of times a year. I also use it to manage investments, and the big payoff for me is when I have to do my taxes and it gives me reports on capital gains and tracks costs basis for me.

I think Microsoft Money is basically the same with a few stylistic differences. Haven’t looked at it in a few years.

3

Microsoft Money was discontinued a year or so back.

We’ve been Quicken users (desktop version) since 1999 and we’re largely very pleased with it. The only thing that annoys me is that you HAVE to upgrade every 3 years or you lose download capability. The “upgrades” don’t really give you much new that’s useful.

What I do like about it is that I have all our finances in the tool. My retirement accounts, Typo Knig’s retirement accounts, the mortgage, our checking accounts, a virtual account for each kid’s allowance, our flex spending accounts… I haven’t added things up but I’d say we have 30+ different accounts of one sort of another.

In addition, there’s also a home inventory tool (we haven’t used), a tax planner (which becomes out of date as soon as it’s a year old, but during that year it can help you figure out whether you’re over or under withheld), an emergency records organizer with things like insurance policy info, safety deposit box info etc.

What I do NOT like: There is no way to enter transactions on the fly (when you’re out and about). So if I make a purchase, I either have to hang onto the receipt and enter it at the desktop, or wait until I do my transaction downloads every few days, and hope I remember what “ADXXQ FINSV” (or similar cryptic title) means. Back when we used our Palm Pilots, we had Pocket Quicken and we could enter stuff there, then they’d import into Quicken when we did a desktop sync.

Intuit knows there’s a demand for their online tool (mint.com) to download into Quicken Desktop, and they refuse to do anything about it. Bastards. And they basically make it impossible to import data from another format such as CSV (as in if you did a spreadsheet or something on your own and wanted to import that).

I used to spend hours every month trying to balance the checkbook. I had to double-check all the math, go through and make sure I’d identified any unchashed checks, etc, correct the math again… and then it would presumably balance.

The first month we had Quicken, I spent at least 12 hours manually entering stuff for the current calendar year. Then I got our next statement.

It took me 20 minutes to balance it.

Depending on how complex your finances are, you might be just as happy with mint.com by comparison. I know it’s not as full-featured as the desktop version but it has the major advantage of being available at all times online (assuming you have smartphones, otherwise that might not be so useful). I have not used this, however, so can’t speak to its functionality.

4

Quicken was around well before 1999; I was using it in 1992, and I don’t think that was version 1.0. I’ve now got about nineteen years worth of data in it, so I’m pretty committed to it. I don’t know why there’s no way to enter stuff online and have it transfer to the standalone program, or why there is no smartphone application. Also, there is a home inventory add-in but it hasn’t been updated in a few years.

5

Oh - and assuming I’ve found your current bank, they do NOT currently interact with Quicken:
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The QIF format they mention has almost completely been eliminated from Quicken (it may still work for credit card accounts). Annoying (back to the “bastards” comment). I do enjoy the Direct Connect (where you initiate a download from within Quicken) and Web Connect (where you initiate the download from the bank) but before my credit union supported that, I just manually entered checking account transactions. All my other stuff, I could get either WebConnect or DirectConnect.

Chase does support DirectConnect - at least they do for our credit card :). As we run a LOT of expenses through that, it helps a lot.

Oh yeah - with the online-only version, it’s possible your bank works with that. I have heard that a number of institutions that do not work with the desktop software do work with the online-only version.

6

(you can tell I’m avoiding a boring work task, LOL)
I just did a search and came across this, which suggests that the online version does not allow reconciling. VERY strange - you’d think that was a basic task!!!

Getting back onto the desktop-version bandwagon: you can set up scheduled transactions (renamed, inexplicably, to Bill and Income Reminders just to confuse the users, I think) so you can get a pretty good forecast of what your financial picture will be. Car payment due on the 9th that’ll take you below zero? Better make a transfer. Oh wait, I get paid on the 8th, will that cover me? Yep!

SplashMoney might also be an option: it looks like they have a desktop and portable version:

7

We have just started working with a financial planner, and he recommended mint.com to us. I was a little worried about security, but there are a ton of articles online, including from the New York Times, that vouch for its security - it’s a “read only” site and you cannot access your accounts for any other purpose besides seeing what you have.

I hate doing budgeting but it does a lot of it itself - it seems to know what categories our debits and charges from the credit card come under. Pretty neat, and I can access all of my financial data, updated in real time, instantly.

8

I know that you can’t initiate payments etc. but does this mean you can’t record your own transactions there? e.g. you know you’re going to get paid on the 15th, and you can’t set that up in advance?

One thing with the desktop software is that you can do that, including categorization (e.g. 1000 gross, 120 federal tax, 50 state tax etc.). Then when the transaction actually hits the account, it matches the two up (but you have the opportunity to review the match). If you have unmatched transactions, they’re added to the local register.

9

I dunno. What I do like is that every transaction is there, and it knows what is was for, for the most part. (I had a debit card transaction that was listed as DIAMOND SHAMRO, and it didn’t know how to categorize it.) Checks of course just come up as CHECK ####, so you have to know what it was for. We write checks so infrequently, that’s easy to do.

As far as detailing your future deposits, I don’t know if you can do that. For us, it’s good because we don’t really have a cash flow issue, but it’s more figuring out where our cash is going. I also like that it sends out alerts when the credit card bill is due. (Virtually all my monthly payments are done via credit card, and I just pay the bill at the end of the month.)