Could anyone recommend some personal finance software to help with household budgets?
I’ve tried Micrsoft Money in the past which was OK, but not fantastic.
Ideally I’d like an open-source programme if there are decent ones out there?
I use iBank on a Mac and like it fine. It isn’t open source, tho.
My checkbook is an MS Excel spreadsheet. This lets me forecast payroll deposits and normal expenses (mortgage payments, utility bills, approximate predictions of upcoming credit card bills, etc.) out into the future so I can see roughly what my checking account is probably going to do over the course of the next calender year. I very rarely write a paper check outside of my house; most of my checking account payments are made online, which means I’m sitting at my computer anyway, so it’s convenient to enter these transaction into my Excel checkbook.
In that same Excel file, I have a worksheet containing a rough budget with my total pay, all payroll deductions (retirement savings, SS, fed/state tax, medicare, etc.) listed separately, and finally take-home pay and expenses tallied up for the year/month/week/day. If you’re smart about where you input raw numbers, and where you let the spreadsheet do the math, it becomes pretty easy to make adjustments to any one raw number or percentage and see how it affects the rest of your budget. The last line of my budget is “discretionary income,” which is take-home pay minus all of the bills. If I pick up a recurring expense (e.g. a car payment), that gets entered into the budget as another bill to be paid, reducing discretionary income. That discretionary income is what gets used for trips, sex toys, new power tools, or just saved/invested for future use.
Most people already have MS office, so this is typically a zero-added-expense way to develop your own money management tools.
Even cheaper: Open Office (which is open source and free). Or a Google Docs spreadsheet.
Intuit (the Quicken people) bought Mint.com then terminated their own online service (quicken.com). The online version isn’t as full-featured as the desktop version, from what I hear; haven’t tried it myself as we have 12 years of data on the desktop version and there’s no communication between the two.
Forgot to add: mint.com is free (if not, obviously, open source).
Free is never free. How is the sight supported? It’s owned by Intuit; does that mean if I use Mint.com I’ll see a bunch of new emails coming from Intuit. I made the mistake of looking into a house refi, and those fuckers at Intuit wouldn’t leave me alone.