Beating Broke

Personal Finance from the Broke Perspective

Looking for New Personal Finance Software

By 1 Comment

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

By 3 Comments

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.

Tax Day: What We’re Doing With Our Refund

By 11 Comments

I dislike getting a refund from the government. I don’t like having to look up the my tax refund status.  I don’t have any good reason to give them an interest free loan, but any changes I make to my W4 don’t seem to make any difference.  I keep getting a refund every year.  This year, the numbers were really off, because we added a dependent last march.  After all the numbers were entered, and the forms filed electronically, the IRS sent us a nice deposit of a little over $3000.  Combined with a bit under $500 from the state, and we end up with $3500 in the bank.

Now, before I go on to tell you what it is we are doing with that money, I need to say something.  For the last several years, we have spent nearly every spare dime we have on paying off debt.  We still have debt that needs to be paid off.  However.  Despite my hate for debt, I’ve come to realize that you cannot let other things slide in order to pay off that debt.  With that in mind, here’s how we’re spending our refund.

We’re getting a new kitchen.  The cupboards in our kitchen are original to the house (circa 1950) and have been painted so many times that they no longer close.  The drawers grind against their frame and the resulting paint dust and wood dust falls down from them onto anything in the cupboards below them.  We have to wash our pans before we can use them because of the dust.  The linoleum on the floor is peeling up.  The carpet is ancient, smelly, and stained.  If you took just the kitchen from our house, it would fit right in with many of the run down slum rentals in town.  We want to move up to a newer (read bigger) house soon, so we need to make this house sellable.  In my opinion, with the kitchen in this condition, it would not sell for what it is worth.  So, we went and bought all new cupboards, countertop, and flooring. Oh, and a dishwasher.  That’s a certifiable luxury, but it helps that we bought it all on sale.  All of the supplies came in at about $2300.  There’s still a few odds and ends that we’ll need to purchase, but we should be able to keep it at about $2700 or less.

This weekend, my father is coming to town to help me install it all.  With any luck, come Monday, it will be mostly finished and usable.

If the plan works, we’ll still have about $800 or so left over.  And with that, we’re buying a couch.  And maybe a loveseat.  Depends on the sale I suppose.   This could be classified as a luxury that we don’t need if it weren’t for the hole in the one cushion, the rips in the spring lining that allows everything to fall between the cushions and disappear into the couch, and the stitching that is coming out at all the seams.  The couches that we are replacing are in dire need of it.  We got them free and have used them for several years.  The couches we had before that were hand me downs and garage sale finds.  It’s time for something new.  And, yes, we could go to garage sales and find new used stuff, but we’ve been saying that for at least a year and haven’t done it, so we’re going to splurge a bit.

When we’re done with all of that, we’ll go back to trying to pay everything off.  My wife’s new business is growing well (that’s another post), and her income is leveling off some, so we can more properly budget for debt repayment.  We’re leaps and bounds from where we were when we got married, and with any luck, 2011 will be the last year we spend with any real debt aside from a mortgage.

What are you doing with your refund?