I want a decent financial budget/investment software

[spaz]

UGHHH. We used Microsoft Money. Then they discontinued it a few years ago. That said, I was wanting to change because it was taking me forever to enter all of our investments by hand. We've tried a couple of others that I hate. We are currently using Mint, but they have had so many dang bugs lately. Today, I log in. My balance is correct, but there are no transaction in our personal bank account since Jan 11 ( last time I logged in) All of our investment accounts, the other accounts at the bank, the credit cards, etc are all correct and have transactions. But I cannot do our budget, nor reconcile the checkbook. ( Yes, I could do it through our bank account website and I did sort of just make sure the major stuff was there, but if I check it off then when I go back to do it in Mint and mark categories and such I won't know what I have done and what I haven't. )

I just want a decent program that tracks investments and that I can keep track of our budget. Sigh... We have so many accounts, though. I dread having to set everything up AGAIN.

[poky]

I use personal capital. It's similar to mint in how it works, but it's more focused on investment than tracking a budget/transactions. I'm liking it better than mint, on the whole. There's no way to split a transaction between categories, which is annoying, and no way to add transactions, and no way to create custom categories for transactions (like I said, more focused on investment than transactions), but it works well enough for our purposes. I keep a spreadsheet budget because I'm picky that way, but if I do it every day or two, it only takes a few minutes a day. There are also no custom tags, so I ended up using personal capital's "business" tag to visually indicate each transaction that's been put in the budget spreadsheet. They occasionally have hiccups with syncing transactions, but their support is reasonably on top of those kinds of things, and pretty responsive.

[spaz]

That won't work.. I split tons of things. Like Sams could be split between pets, groceries, personal items, etc. They withdraw USAA insurance and it is split for house, car, umbrella, boat and ring insurance. Our stuff is pretty complicated. I also have several savings divisions in our savings account at the bank: Insurance ( long term care/ disablity/life insurance premium savings); car savings ( we pay cash for our cars), property tax, new rv fund, emergency fund, Mike's fun fund, my fun fund, etc.

[spotty_dog]

Quicken could probably do all that you're looking for. We don't really utilize it fully, but it certainly has multi-category splits, automatic updates from investment accounts, etc.

(We keep basic check registers in Quicken, and update the balances now and again manually. I make investment decisions based on my Excel spreadsheet which I update manually when I need it.)

[spaz]

So it will import our myriad of investments: 529, Roth, Sep, Vanguard, Fidelity, etc? I know we tried Quicken twice and didn't like it, but I don't remember why. I'll probably wait to switch to whatever until December of next year. Manually entering 100 accounts is just daunting, and I just don't have time.

[Thirteen]

We enjoy YNAB.


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[spotty_dog]

Yeah, the premise is that if you give Quicken the logins to your investment service providers and brokerages and banks, they'll import the stuff for you.

I've also heard great things about YNAB. We don't budget in detail but since you do it would probably be a good fit. But looking into it briefly, I think it only does investment accounts as manual entries, which might not be what you are looking for.

[poky]

You could use personal capital just for investment accounts, and figure something else out for transaction tracking and budgeting.

[spaz]

You could use personal capital just for investment accounts, and figure something else out for transaction tracking and budgeting.

OOOH!! Never heard of personal capital, but it looks like EXACTLY what my husband wants/needs. He was just saying that on his time off this weekend he was wanting us to plug in numbers for some retirement tool that Sound Mind Investing does that is supposed to be good. I'll show it to him. THANKS!!

[metroguy]

sounds way too complicated.. in the end.. isn't money just money? whether you separate it or not.. i would pool all money in 1 or 2 places.. same goes for investments.
as a caution, i'm bad at taking this advice...i got like 6 401k.. 5 ira, 7 bank accounts. it's been causing me headaches to manage all this stuff..

[Windsurfer]

sounds way too complicated.. in the end.. isn't money just money? whether you separate it or not.. i would pool all money in 1 or 2 places.. same goes for investments.
as a caution, i'm bad at taking this advice...i got like 6 401k.. 5 ira, 7 bank accounts. it's been causing me headaches to manage all this stuff..

I am Quicken refugee who switched to MoneyDance shareware when I found out Quicken 2016 was full of bugs and my Quicken 2013 was no longer allowed to download data from our banking and investment accounts. Mint is interesting and WealthSimple (a Toronto startup) is intriguing but the only cloud I really trust with our family's investment details is the one in my home office.

MoneyDance lacks some of Quiken's more advanced features but it is reliable. Someday when I have a lot of time on my hands I'll use its Python to slice and dice the data to make it just the way I want it. In the meantime I'll just limp along.

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[fluffhead]

So do you actually enter account numbers and passwords into a software package to keep track of assets? Aren't you terrified of people breaking into this thing?

[spaz]

The program isn't allowed to withdraw money or anything like that. I'm more worried about them actually hacking into the bank. I still don't like MINT, but haven't found anything better. I just do not have time to enter hundreds of entries by hand.
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