Beating Broke

Personal Finance from the Broke Perspective

Why I Don’t Use an Online Financial Tool

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I don’t use any online financial tools.  And it’s not for the reason you’re probably thinking of.  It isn’t because I’m afraid that my information is going to get stolen and some hacker is going to run off and steal all my money to buy the country of Dubai.  It’s not that I don’t find them to be useful.  In fact, I find them to be quite useful.  For most people who aren’t me.

Actually, the reason that I don’t use any online financial tools is that very few (read: none) of them seem to connect to all of my accounts.  I’m not a person who likes having only half the picture.  I like to see everything all at once.  Not half here, and half there, or one account here, and the rest over there.  Everything.  Part of this is my fault.  I use all kinds of accounts.  Most of them are online accounts and usually show up in any of the tools that I try and connect them to.  But, I also use some local accounts.  Those local accounts are usually the problem.

Ready For Zero

I tried using this not that long ago.  They’re a sponsor of the Debt Movement, and have glowing reviews around the web for their tool.  And, from what I’ve seen of the Ready for Zero tool, it does look like a pretty cool tool.  It allows you to set up your accounts, get them set up into a payment plan similar to a debt snowball and then helps you optimize that plan for the best bang for your buck.  Only one problem.  My local Credit Union accounts aren’t linkable.  If I can’t include a good portion of my debt accounts in the plan, it throws off the entire plan.  How can I expect the tool to give me accurate information if it doesn’t have accurate account information to go off of?

Adaptu

Adaptu is a little bit like Mint.  They both allow for linking all of your accounts (deposit and loan) and then their tool gives you a full overview of your finances.  There’s more to both, of course, but I stopped investigating when I couldn’t link up all of my accounts.  The culprit in both cases was, again, my local Credit Union account.

There are other tools, but every one of them I’ve tried has had a similar problem.  In most cases, it’s the local CU that is causing the hiccup.  Is that fair to the tools?  Probably not.  Really, it’s more of a poor reflection on the local institution than it is on the tools.

Yes, I could move my finances to another institution and probably start using some of these tools.  But, I’m lazy.  For a long time, I was forced to have an account there, so it made sense to just use it for all of my banking.  Now that I’m not required, I find that I just don’t want to tackle having everything changed to a new institution.  What a hassle to change automatic transactions, re-enter all my bill pay stuff, and then link a new account to the myriad of other places that I have accounts.  It’s just easier to not do it.

Except when I want to use an online tool.

Do you use any online tools?  Have you ever had problems with getting your accounts linked up in them?  What did you do about it?

Money Management Software Changes

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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.