Anyone Use Financial Software to Keep Track of Finances? (Quicken..)

[Spooner]

Are these things worth it?

 

[Electric Amish]

They can be....especially if you can interface with your bank.

I have Quicken, but I don't use it.

amish

 

[vi edit]

Only if you are meticulous enough to keep it up to date. I've tried switching over to electronic methods on about 10 different things(check books, calendars, phone books, ect) and I always keep coming back to using good old pen and paper for doing it.

I start out using these electronic means of doing things, but end up getting lazy and never following through with them.

 

[mcveigh]

definately, I used MS money then recently switched to quicken

take the time to learn how to use them (not hard) and also setup your bank info to download into it

 

[Spooner]

It looks like they charge $10 for online bill payments... my bank charges $4 to do it through them............

I think that's a bit pricy Quicken..... what are some really good features of it?

 

[vi edit]

I've never used quicken, but MS Money has some nice loan features. You can get amortization tables from it, you can plug in extra amounts for monthly payments and it'll tell you how much quicker you can pay off your loans. It also has some nice debt management features.

 

[Spooner]

I would basically want to use it as a glorified Excel.

Have my income for the month saved somewhere... input all my expenses and then extrapolate different graphs / saving scenarios / budgets, etc...

Is quicken good for this purpose?

Which is better? Money or Quicken?

 

[mcveigh]

I do it through my bank, not quicken, I agree they want too much money.
somebanks allow you to do it for free.
you don't have to do bill pay with it you should be able to download transactions for free.

 

[kranky]

Yes, you must be disciplined about keeping all your records current. I have been using Quicken for years and I am glad - it tracks spending against budget, helps you allocate your spending into categories, allows me to download my credit card statement directly (so every transaction can be charged to the right category), etc. I still don't let it print my checks because I refuse to pay the high cost for the blank checks, but some people prefer the convenience.

I'm not anal about tracking the last penny, since I put the $50/week I pull out of the ATM into the category "spending money". But since I have been using it for a few years I can tell that the new windows in the house reduced my heating bill by about 20%, I can make sure I'm not spending too much on different things, and at income tax time I can transfer all my Quicken entries into TurboTax which saves me a lot of time. The only thing I don't like about Quicken is that every new release seems to take away features! That's why I still have the 1998 version (I think that's the one) on disk because it includes savings and retirement calculators which somehow disappeared from later versions - because it became a separate product they charged for.

 

[Cerebus451]

I've used Quicken for over 10 years now. It's the only thing I use to track my finances. Once you get going with it, it becomes a very useful tool. With 10 years of data I can actually formulate meaningful budgets using the data. Tax time becomes easier because instead of hunting receipts I just print the report from Quicken and take it from there. The only thing I use my checkbook ledger for is to write down the amounts of my checks just until I enter them in Quicken. I am used to entering all of my credit card receipts, ATM receipts, etc into the system, and so I can use Quicken to track any of my account balances and know they are up to date. I could get the information by going to all the various bank web sites and compiling the information, which is what I would have to do if I didn't use Quicken to track it. It does take some time to get used to entering everything in, but for me it's just second nature now.