Poll: Do you use Quicken (or commercial equiv) to track spending/budget?

[haha]

I use Excel for the better control I perceive. I really do not want many of Quicken's features anyway.

 

[ksr]

I've used Quicken for many years. I'm unlikely to switch to another program anytime soon, as I've been accused of being a WILIWIK (What I Like Is What I Know).

I really do like the ease of reporting in Quicken, which can quickly show me what I've spend by category year-to-date, last year, etc. And I have to say honestly that even though I considered myself frugal before I started tracking spending, using Quicken and seeing the totals before my eyes really did help me to adjust my spending to be in line with my values.

 

[braumeister]

I'm trying to decide between a couple of Mac packages and am leaning towards Moneydance. Does it allow you to tag items as discretionary and non-discretionary? I plan on using Moneydance for budgeting and expense tracking only and the D and Non-D tag is critical. I recall looking for the info but couldn't find it. Thx.

Yes, Moneydance lets you tag transactions any way you want.

You can download the full application for free (the only limitation is that you can only enter 100 transactions before you have to buy it for $50).

Moneydance® 2011 - Personal Finance Manager for Mac, Windows, and Linux

 

[Alan]

I have always used spreadsheets as I don't track expenses to a fine detail. Most outgoings are on a couple of credit cards, and a typical month on my bank account has no more than 10 entries.

I do track investments using my VG account, linking it to DW's Fidelity account so very little manual input, and the portfolio analysis tools show the breakdown of the holdings.

However, I still track the investments on spreadsheets, calculating IRR.

I also use a withdrawal spreadsheet that I update each January, to calculate % withdrawals, target withdrawal $ based on CPI etc.

 

[FUEGO]

Spreadsheet user. I have 24 different spending categories. I download the credit card transaction data (in csv spreadsheet format) monthly, and copy/paste my electronic checkbook (also a spreadsheet) transactions monthly. Get all monthly transactions into a list and then "manually" categorize them. I say manually in quotes, because I sort by expense name and usually there are many transactions bunched together like (10 walmart transactions), so I copy/paste the "13" category code for grocery/household expenses next to all 10 entries. When done I sort transactions by category code, then I have to copy/paste into my 24 categories on my spreadsheet. I may overhaul my spreadsheets to automate and simplify soon. I spend about 1 hr a month preparing the summary of monthly spending, but could probably cut it in half (with some sacrifice in presentation) with some tweaks to the spreadsheet.

Works for me, and I don't have to deal with quicken or other proprietary software, upgrades, bugs, checking to make sure all transactions are downloaded, etc. And I can do whatever custom analysis and graphs/charts I want for my own purposes.

 

[palomalou]

Dear spouse builds Excel spreadsheets that are far above my understanding. I don't know what Quicken does, although my father used it. Couldn't get into his computer on his death to get any info from there or get a look at what it does.

 

[grasshopper]

My 86 YO mom's uses Quicken, her husband who passed 2 YO set everything up. It just runs automatically, and she downloads all her stuff everyday. I only get a call to help her about every 6 months. I will have to get an update soon, because it will sunset shortly. I can walk her through downloading the 2012 version.

 

[happy2bretired]

I transitioned over to iBank when I bought my new Mac. I really liked Quicken better but, iBank is ok for now. I would be completely lost without my budgeting and reconciling software. (yes, I'm one of those that reconcile bank statements) My regularly scheduled income/expense transactions are set up on my calendar for automatic entry via iBank. Everything else, I manually input. I don't track any investment data.

 

[Packman]

I've been using Quicken for almost 20 years. Don't know how I could live without it. I most like the ability to not only track dollars but payee's. For example, DW and I were talking about getting a new mattress. Looked up our last mattress purchase in Q and found it was 10 years old. We were also talking about going back to this great hotel we stayed at several years ago. Boom, found the name and date in seconds in Q.

On the down side, it does take time to maintain, and once in a while, I can't figure out how to do something on the investment side. But, like Midpack, I have all of our investments at Fidelity for about 4 years now, so I can find it there.

 

[GLM]

Quicken for years

I started with "CA Simply Money " not long after we got our first home computer - Probably before 1990. I have used Quicken for over 15 years. On my fourth or fifth version. The transitions have gone smoothly but each edition has its quirks.

After youngest child finished college at the end of 2007, we were finally empty nesters without high auto insurance and college costs on the books . That's when I began to really track where our money goes more than budget. (Using credit cards for virtually everything and downloading the statements in to quicken is a big help. ) Having lived on very little for several very lean early years frugality is sort of a habit. I just wanted to know what we spend and where, to be reassured that or goal for retirement was appropriate .

After tracking for four years it is kind surprising how even our year to year spend has been. Bulges in the budget have been choices and kinda spread evenly . (My decision to get braces - finally off last month - DH rebuild of his 1966 GTO engine.)

It is nice to feel confident about how much we need to live like we do now . Add in extra for more travel, medical insurance , (on our own there ) , a pool for auto replacement and a category I call "s**t happens. " Back on this board today researching the LTC insurance debate. It's a big peice of the puzzle I have yet to resolve.

 

[Rowdy]

I've used both Quicken and MS Money; both became a task to keep up with. Later transitioned to Yodlee Money Center which downloads all of your account info together.

About 1 - 2 years ago, USAA started offering downloading of all accounts (including non USAA accounts) into their site. It works great, you can see all of your accounts (investments, credit cards, loans, etc) on one screen. You can set up budgets, email alerts, text alerts, etc. I get a text alert and email whenever a budget category is exceeded. Anyone can join USAA banking; insurance is the only product restricted to Veterans.

 

[savory]

I use Yodlee Money Center for everything. It links all accounts and updates automatically. It's saved in the cloud so I can check it anywhere. It is not easy to put historical transactions into the model (or at least this was true for me) but very easy to set up for future financial transactions. I expect if you have a program that updates and categorizes your spending by category & total (by week, month, YTD, ) , investments, net worth, cash flow, and tax support mostly done automatically (or with minimal entries by the user), then the programs will likely be very similar. Yodlee has met my needs in terms of measuring spending, analyzing spending, keeping tracks of all of my accounts, and seeing the affect of net worth as it relates to income/market gain/market loss/& spending

 

[Katsmeow]

There are a lot of different philosophies of budgeting and the budgeting software that you choose will work best for you if it is reflective of your philosophy. Before I started using YNAB I always found that programs such as MS Money or Quicken were fine for recording what you had already spent and were fine for creating an aspirational budget. For many people that is all they want or need so those programs are great for budgeting for them.

But, for me, I wanted a budgeting program that would actually help me to stay within a budget. When I was using MS Money or Quicken they didn't really do that. That is recording spending and creating a budget were really separate acts. It was perfectly fine in those programs to create a budget and spend more.

What I liked when I found YNAB is that the program is really designed to have you only budget and spend money that you have. It is based upon the concept that you give every dollar a job and you don't give jobs to dollars that you don't have. It is quite different philosophically to most budgeting programs but it is the first budgeting program I ever worked with that really changed some of my spending decisions as I was actually making them.

 

[JmfromTx]

I just use a spreadsheet. I only have six mutual funds, three in IRA's and three in taxable and my bank account. I figure my spending on the first of each month from my bank account and download all the totals from the funds and come up with all the figures I feel I need. I don't see the need (for myself) to get any more detailed than that.

 

[Khufu]

This has to have been asked, but I didn't see it using Search.

I've tried it twice (years ago), but never thought it was worth the discipline, so I built my own spreadsheets. But now that we almost never write checks any more, and downloading transactions is far more readily available, maybe we need to reconsider.

The primary purpose of any accounting system is to have an independent reference point against which to reconcile the reports from the custodians of your assets. If you just copy the custodian's report of transactions into your own software, what you have is merely a local copy and cannot be used to do a reconciliation.

I have been running a household budgeting system for more than twenty years entering all transactions by hand. The only transactions I accept on faith from the custodians are interest on cash, which I can't very well calculate myself.

And, yes, I have found errors which I got the custodian to fix.

 

[joeprintz]

IBank

With so many MAC users out there I'm surprised there is no comment about IBANK. Lion works much better with IBANK than Quicken and there is an easy conversion. Although not perfect I really like using it.

 

[NW-Bound]

I used MS Money for many years to track my investments. Even when I did not trade, I still wanted to know my daily net worth, which was spread out across his/her 401k's, TIRAs, Roth IRAs, brokerage accounts, I-Bonds, etc...

My wife, who has always been taking care of bills and expenses, has her own spreadsheet to keep track of outgoing money. As we always under-spent our income (except the times when there was no income and we had to live off our savings), we never had a budget, and this was more for accounting and tracking purposes.

I switched to Quicken 2 years ago, when MS Money went defunct. This time, I set up Quicken so that it also downloaded our checking account and American Express card transactions.

With Quicken's auto-categorizing the expenses, without doing any manual entry, I can now see what we spent on food, gasoline, insurance, etc... Occasionally, I would go in to re-classify some expense items, such as separating out fuel and maintenance cost for the RV from those for the cars for better tracking. I would be too lazy to do what my wife does with her spreadsheet.

The ability to call up any past expense item or category is really neat. I have always underestimated what we spent for any category. None of this knowledge has changed our spending habits yet, but it is interesting to see where our money goes.

 

[Alan]

With so many MAC users out there I'm surprised there is no comment about IBANK. Lion works much better with IBANK than Quicken and there is an easy conversion. Although not perfect I really like using it.

You do have a friend on this thread who also uses ibank

http://www.early-retirement.org/for...rack-spending-budget-60232-2.html#post1165734

 

[M Paquette]

With so many MAC users out there I'm surprised there is no comment about IBANK. Lion works much better with IBANK than Quicken and there is an easy conversion. Although not perfect I really like using it.

I just started using iBank 4, importing 18 years of banking and investment history from Quicken with only a little fiddling needed. Mostly stuff like changing "Buy" to "Buy to Close" on option activity and similar corner case stuff.

Quicken 2007 was the last Mac version other than the almost useless Quicken Essentials, and it doesn't run on the latest versions of the Mac operating system. Quicken Essentials can't track investments beyond downloading and showing your portfolio current value. Cost basis? Whazzat? Rumor is that now that the company that does iBank has hired two Mac programmers from Intuit, the Quicken company, that the Mac products are dead.

IBank takes a little getting used to compared to Quicken, but it definitely does the job. It handles OFX data downloads along with the usual QFX and similar formats, so it can get online data into its registers. Prints checks, generates reports,etc just fine. (I bolted together some tax reports for last year that work quote well.) The underlying database iBank uses is the very well tested SQLite package.

 

[INTJ10]

We just started using Mint to track spending/bugets. We didn't really use anything previously so it is a big improvement.

 

[columbus]

We use mint a lit too, I think just due to bad discipline/not stayingvon top of anything else. I had a spreadsheet that created financials but didn't stick with it and mint is so great to see net worth and different buckets

 

[rescueme]

We use Excel for budget creation/updates and Quicken to track the results. IOW, don't use the budget tab on Quicken. I guess we're (or at least me) are more anal on the forcast side and just use Quicken to provide high-level matching against the detail budget.

It just turned out that way over the years.

BTW, to "davef", if you use Yodlee and also FIDO, you can see the same budget info/expense on the FIDO side. Yodlee/FIDO have a relationship and FIDO uses Yodlee to provide account information for their Full View screens to provide the same budget/reporting upon an auto refresh.

 

[happy2bretired]

With so many MAC users out there I'm surprised there is no comment about IBANK. Lion works much better with IBANK than Quicken and there is an easy conversion. Although not perfect I really like using it.

You missed me...I use iBank.

I like it too but I like Quicken better. The transition went very smoothly from Quicken to iBank. I don't know if and when Quicken for Lion will happen, but if it does, I hope the transition BACK goes just a smoothly. Course by that time, I might just stay with iBank.

 

[RunningBum]

I did two years of my own spreadsheet before retirement to better adjust my budget and do a reality check to see if I was ready to fire. Last year I decided it wasn't worth the work. It gave me a better handle on some recreational expenses, but my regular expenses were easy enough to budget for, and the less common ones (major home repairs, etc) just have to be estimated and spread out over the years.

 

[DaveJ]

I am somewhat old school... I use Notepad, Excel, and Calc to track all of my spending. I tried Quicken once quite a while back but found it to be too complicated for my needs as my finances are very simple, and getting it to do what I wanted was tedious.

I've paid all of my bills online for years, and instead I have a monthly text file with line items for each of my bills. As bills get paid I move them from the "Not Paid" section to the "Paid" section, with the confirmation number next to each one in case I need it, and I keep a running total going so I can compare the balance to what shows up in Checking.

For long-term planning I have an Excel spreadsheet that breaks down my transactions monthly and lets me project out expenses for a year or more. Given that I get paid monthly as well it works great.