How many of you use software to track finances?

MS Excel here. Have used it for checking/savings accounts since early 2000s, and since late 2000s my wife and I have used it to keep track of our nest egg - both the work-based 401K type stuff, and the jointly held mutual funds we have.

For the checking account, I can prepopulate the spreadsheet with known upcoming bills like house/car payments and credit card payments. The credit card payments are estimates based on historical values - until any given CC bill gets actually paid, at which point I type in the true value. But having estimates in there lets me forecast an approximate balance a year down the road.

For our nest egg, we check share prices and quantities once a month for our various investments and punch them into the spreadsheet. Just like for the checking account, the spreadsheet forecasts nest egg balances down the road so we can see what our balance is likely to be at retirement. It also tallies bonds as a percent of the whole, so we can keep track of allocation and make decisions without having to do a bunch of math by hand.

Excel has also been useful for estimating what car and house payments would be under various configurations of purchase price, downpayment, payback period, and interest rate.

I’ve never had that particular problem with unresponsive FAs My situation is sorta the opposite. I have a retirement date fixed by law and enjoy my work too much to quit early. Circumstances now force me to live far below my means and as a result about 3/4ths of my net income goes into savings/investments. More or less when I retire the goal is to consume about 30 years of accumulated capital & gains in about 10 years before I’m too decrepit to enjoy it. Then settle down to a comfortable burn rate until the end. Now that is a non-standard accumulate / decumulate curve!

I’m sure your wife was pissed. Get this one:

My wife is a now-retired attorney. Her entire working life her mother was insanely proud of her “brilliant” legal daughter. However whenever Mom needed legal advice she’d ask me. If my wife / her daughter answered the info was roundly ignored. But she’d hang on my every word. I’ve picked up a smidgen of law by osmosis over the dinner table, but otherwise that’s not my field even a little bit.

So what did I do? Refuse to answer questions immediately. Get my wife’s answers from her, then call Mom back and repeat what I’d been told. Worked like a charm.

As you might imagine, my wife was pissed. Mom was always at her best delivering guilt and/or mixed messages. Sweet and well-meaning, but very trying for her kids.

I’m also a current web version YNAB (You need a Budget) user. I like it a lot and check it daily, and it’s a nice way to make sure that all my charges are actually legit without having to log into three different sites every week. I had an excel spreadsheet before it and also used Mint. But I found Mint to be more of a log rather than a goal-type of program, so I switched. I especially like YNAB for its goal functionality. It did take me a month or two for it to really click though.

Oh, me, big time. So much that I actually enjoy doing my small business bookkeeping every week. I’ll fly that freak flag proudly, thanks! LOL!

We use Quicken for personal finance and Quickbooks for my biz. My husband does our personal finances except that he’s not interested in analysis that much, so I will periodically dump data out of Quicken and into Excel and graph it. I do that also with my Quickbooks data and actually have a collection of Excel reports that I maintain - some updated and reviewed weekly, a bunch updated and analyzed annually. I adore charts and graphs, so I guess the chore of bookkeeping is a means to the end - or the cost of my candy. Did I mention that I was a freak?

I have used Quicken as a check register since dinosaurs walked the earth. And we use credit cards for all purchases, so I do the “split” function for categorization. I don’t download anything, it’s all manual entry. Also, I have a few spreadsheets for tracking portfolio balances and targets.

I suppose we are comfortable enough that I don’t need to track every penny, but I get comfort in knowing where everything is going. But I’m not a spender anyway, so there is that. My spouse, on the other hand…

I’m curious about why you enter your bank & CC transactions manually instead of downloading them? I categorize manually where needed.

I concede that I may not know how to use the download feature properly, but once I tried and it wanted to go back in history and stomp all over what I had already in there. It ended up a dog’s breakfast and I restored a backup to fix it. So, once burned, twice shy.

And please, friends of SDMB, please PLEASE don’t let this discussion descend into explaining to me how to do it right. I’m fine with how I do it now, thank you very much.

Those of you who are using Excel for this; do you have custom workbooks or do you use canned ones?

I built mine from a completely blank spreadsheet.

I honestly didn’t even have the Excel skill to do it at the time, but I didn’t need it to do anything super-complicated so Googling formulas for certain things that were beyond me was enough to get it working the way I wanted. It probably would have been easier to start with a template, but I wanted to fully understand how the whole thing worked, although of course I’ve forgotten it by now. :grinning:

I’ve used Quicken for decades, with a couple of multi-year breaks. I download the expenses (mine and our joint accounts) every Saturday morning, and check on stocks and investment funds. I also have a huge spreadsheet for my investments that I maintain once per quarter, and a couple of other spreadsheets to keep up with the monthly payments (did I get my Visa bill on the 10th as usual? Have I pre-programmed a payment for it at my bank, and for what date?).

When my hubby complained, I replaced Quicken’s default .WAV for transaction entry (“Ka-ching!”) with a discrete “bloop”.

The part that annoys me is that parts of Quicken seem to intentionally break after a few years. My Quicken 2008 stopped downloading stock and index prices at one point. I don’t think the APIs have changed that much. I think it stopped in 2018, which would make for a suspiciously round number.

I used custom workbooks but I’m really strong at Excel and honestly there is nothing complicated in what I’m doing. Just some formulas and formatting in the end.

I have built my own custom spreadsheets. Currently:

  • One annual tab for “planned” income/outgoing
  • One annual tab for “actual” income/outgoing
  • One tab each, for each pay period, that draws from the “planned” tab’s entries, and populates the “actual” tab’s entries
  • One tab updated monthly with all of my assets and liabilities (basically my portfolio)

It’s not that tough to set up, just lots of cut-and-paste or ‘make a copy’ of tabs. I think Tripler-Nomics rev 9.1 (for 2021) took me all of two hours on a Sunday to set up. That was using last year’s template and making some updates.

Excel is nice for me, because of it’s flexibility and customization. I don’t use macros, 'cause I’m not that good of a programmer. But, next rev is going to incorporate a Gantt chart to help me phase out some savings plans that I want to do over the course of the year. Also, my local copy of Excel is ‘off the cloud’ and makes me feel safer, in knowing that the Russians are less likely to hack into it and see my $20/month ice cream habit.

Tripler
My net worth? “Banana.”

I’m with you, I enter everything manually also, since that gives me more of a hands on feel for what we spent. Actually since Quicken is on my wife’s computer she enters the checks/payments and I balance it every month which finds typos and missing entries.

So, you are dieting, no?

I’ve been using an Excel spreadsheet for over 20 years and it seems sufficient for us, along with our bank account online statements. I used to keep a Schedule D
Excel spreadsheet back when I invested in stocks and mutual funds, but I no longer need it.

Yeah, my opinion is that entering transactions manually gets you more in touch with your finances, particularly if you do it shortly after the transactions occur. My personal preference is to enter manually then use the import feature to verify what is already there.

This.

  • One tab for checking/savings numbers, another where balances are plotted.
  • One tab for our mutual funds.
  • One tab for her work-related retirement accounts.
  • One tab for my work-related retirement accounts.
  • One for our mortgage.
  • One for my car payment.
  • One big tab that rolls together all the month-by-month balances on one big sheet.
  • One tab that plots our nest egg over time.

There’s a whole other workbook where I’ve got a rough budget laid out. Not something we deliberately follow, more like the other way around, i.e. I laid it out one year based on that year’s expenses, just to understand roughly where our money went. I also have other hypothetical budgets showing how things might look if my wife were unemployed, or if I quit my side job. Still others where I project various retirement scenarios (i.e. when we retire, what SS and pension might look like on those dates, etc.).

Had to make room for the $300 steak-and-eggs-for-breakfast-on-weekdays diet.

Tripler
Filet mignon ain’t cheap, brother!

I use GnuCash for historical tracking / account reconciliation, and a Google Sheets spreadsheet for budgeting. I use other spreadsheets to track my investments and format that data for import into GnuCash (I like having the info in multiple places, I just don’t like entering it more than once).

The Budgeting and Investment tracker spreadsheets are all homebrew and all no-cost.

I replaced my paper checkbook register with Quicken a few decades ago, and still use it to track my savings, checking, and 401(k) accounts. I’m currently debt-free, but whenever I have a car loan (or something) I track it in Quicken as well. I don’t track my credit card spending, though I keep the monthly statements and annual summaries that my credit union provides.

I’ve also used a simple Excel sheet for my budget for as long as I can remember; I think even before I started to use Quicken. I lived paycheck-to-paycheck for a long time, and I used the spreadsheet to know how much I could expect to have “left over” each pay period: paycheck amount - the bills due before the next check = what I could spend on food, entertainment, etc. A few years ago my finances finally improved to the point where I don’t need to include numbers anymore, but I still use Excel to track which bills will come out of a given paycheck*. I project out several months, and I like the look-ahead – and having a reminder of when the quarterly bills (water, trash, etc.) will be coming due. Plus, there have been at least two times when the gas company failed to send me an electronic bill, and my spreadsheet kept me from missing a payment.

I also have a tab in the same workbook where I track all of my subscriptions and memberships: how much I paid, the length of the term, when it expires, and whether it will auto-renew. I consider that info to be part of my finances.

*If I got paid on the same date(s) every month it would be simpler, but I get paid every other week.