What software do you use?

[Jim]

Just wondering what kind of software others use to help keep track of personal finances.  I've used Quicken in the past...never liked it much at all but suffered thru it because it was the only one that had direct downloading of transactions from financial institutions.  Now they've made changes including, you MUST use an online quicken.com account, and they've gone to a subscription model.  Done with that.

I've toyed with others including You Need a Budget...meh, not impressed.  Have heard of others including Moneydance, and a few others.  But none of them really seem to get it right.  So again, just wondering what others use and what are the pluses and minuses of your software of choice?

 

 

 

[ENT Doc]

Numbers

[Peds]

excel.

google sheets.

 

[bean1970]

Personal capital. it has actually saved me a few times. The credit cards accounts are nearly in realtime.. I check it every morning and have caught fraudulent charges before the cc has even called or picked up on it. Rarely something is miscategorized, but as i've used it for quite some time now there are rarely errors.....though i was in college station TX this month and nearly everything was categorized under education.....lol.  it like how it pulls your allocation across accounts as well (and you can manually change allocation as well).

[treesrock]

Depends on whether you want to do this by hand, or by some automated method.  Physician on Fire has a bunch of excel spreadsheets on his blog that you can use if you'd like to go that route.

I prefer Mint.com for my credit card purchases, and Personal Capital for my investment/bank accounts.  I realize this exposes me (x2) to hackers and such, but I'm ok with that risk considering the incredible convenience these two services provide.

[jacoavlu]

ditto excel and google sheets

[Kamban]

Have Quicken 2016 that will expire in 2019. We will see then. I am used to quicken.

If the subscription model costs too much, I will do the entries by hand. Not a deal breaker to me.

[ACN]

Personal capital.

Google excel for NW tracking, investment allocation, and savings / tax tracking.

[GasFIRE]

Kamban wrote:

Have Quicken 2016 that will expire in 2019. We will see then. I am used to quicken.

If the subscription model costs too much, I will do the entries by hand. Not a deal breaker to me.

Click to expand...

I'm in the same boat. I already do my transaction entries by hand, which is OK since I don't do much trading anymore. I do like the convenience of downloading quotes which i don't really want to do by hand so I too am looking for an alternative that lets me to track my portfolio without having to allow access to my account info like Personal Capital.

[Jim]

Even without trading, all the dividends and other micro-transactions would be too unwieldy to enter by hand.

I'm seeing a theme in some of the responses above.  Many people are using Personal Capital, which is fine (I have an account with them too), but I am reticent to use a cloud-based service as my sole point of entry.  I'm old-fashioned and I like my data on my own hard drives.

Others are using spreadsheets and Google docs, but no one really elaborated so I don't know which spreadsheets in particular they are using (probably homegrown, I would guess) or how I would enter data downloaded from banks in Quicken or .csv format into those sheets.

 

[MPMD]

I just became a personal capital convert. really really like it. clean and it updates in real time.

[CordMcNally]

I use Mint. It’s nice to look at activity on all my accounts in one place. I use an excel spreadsheet for monitoring net worth and asset allocation.

[Molar Mechanic]

I use a few:

I use Quicken Home & Business 2017 for my Personal and my LLC transactions.  I like that I can separate transactions that go to the business and ones that go to home.  I do use a business card and a personal card, but inevitably some stuff gets crossed, and it is super easy to tag it in Quicken.  I use this for all bank and credit card transactions, but don't let quicken see my investments, assets, or loan balances.  I've had plenty of popups asking me to convert to the subscription, but have resisted them all to date.  I suspect I'll accept it if I'm forced to the subscription model, but mostly because I need my business and my personal data tracked clearly in one software.

Personal Capital:  I love the ability to track investments and loans here.  I don't let it see my credit card or bank transactions, but will once or twice a month carry the cash balance from quicken into the account just to get a more accurate net worth in PC.

We also use Xero for my Practice.  It's fine, but honestly I just label stuff in there and the accountants do the heavy lifting.

I've used Mint in the past, but their ability to track business vs personal was awful.

[ENT Doc]

It's the last comment here and others like it elsewhere that caused me to avoid all the fancy display charts and tracking you get from PC or Mint:

https://www.bogleheads.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=238482

[Jim]

@ENT Doc, wow that was pretty disconcerting.  Another reason I don't like cloud-based services.