What Budgeting Tools Do You Use?

[tomtom]

I have been looking for a budgeting tool and was wondering what others are using. I did purchase Quicken Home at the beginning of 2008 and have been tracking since then. I thought I would give it 2 months and see where things stand and try to create a budget from that. Does anyone use Quicken for this? If so, what tips and/or tricks do you have?

[kav122]

I am completely OCD and I use only Excel. In it, I have a created my own worksheet where I keep my important information (login names, websites, etc).

Then I have a worksheet where I track 'money in'. Then I have my worksheet where I have each month, and each bill. I highlight the ones that I will pay in the next two week period. This is nice because I can see what, say, my electric bill has averaged over the past couple of March's. I also insert a comment after I pay the bill online for the confirmation number, so if I ever need to go back to it, I can.

Then I have a worksheet for each month's budget, which differs from the "bill" worksheet, because it includes my cash for groceries, gas, tithe, etc.

THEN, in a complete show of anal-retentiveness, I have worksheets for my student loan and mortgage, with the total owed, minus the extra payments, and the expected payoff date. Each month I love seeing how it is only going to take X years to payoff this or that. Yes, I'm a little overzealous, but it works to keep me on task.

I have thought about Quicken or MS Money or something like that, but my system seems to be working pretty well, so I think I'll save my dough.

[72Tiger]

I write things down in a small notebook, and transfer to Excel each day. I like the flexibility of a spreadsheet.

[rolltimer]

I use Quicken for the Mac. I have used various versions, all for the Mac, since 1996. Unfortunately, I cannot give the Quicken products a good recommendation. When upgrading to newer versions, the older data does not convert well and I have had to re-enter amounts, losing past history such as purchase dates and amounts on stocks, and not being able to go back in time to see trends, gather data for capital gains from previous versions. I have also experienced many difficulties with running their Quick Reports. For example: When I receive a dividend payment for a stock, I post the amount to a cash account with the stock ticker symbol listed in the memo column. I am unable to run a report for a time period using the menu column value to see the amount of dividends paid by a stock or even have it show a listing of the dates so I can manually add the amounts. I've also had problems printing in Quicken. Both Quicken and Quickbooks have been bundled when purchasing a Mac computer. I have never bought the product "in the box". However, Quickbooks was not included in the software on the MacBook Pro that I just purchased a month ago whereas it was when I was first researching the purchase of a new Mac and deciding between the MacBook, MacBook Pro, iMac and the Mac Mini. I recall an issue recently with users losing data when upgrading in one of Intuit's products, either Quicken or Quickbooks or QuickbooksPro. I'm not sure which one it was.

[Finally_Frugal]

I purchased Quicken last year and discovered that it just didn't mesh well with the way I budget, nor was it able to download everything I needed from my various online accounts. If you're willing to read manuals and tweak, tweak, tweak, then I think it's a good product (some people swear by it!). I have to admit, the graphs and pie charts are pretty cool, once you have the data entered accurately.

For me, though, Excel is my tool of choice. It's simple---I can set up formulas on my own that calculate interest, subtract debits, and add credits, and I can also make quick and dirty changes to see what the various outcomes would be, of, say, paying $100 more a month on my mortgage. It just works really well for my budgeting goals, and I didn't need anything fancy.

[gtwise]

I use Quicken 2008 and the built in Savings Goal system to do budgeting. It does an OK job there is one wish I had which is to be able to budget for categories with subcategories as a whole. This is not currently available which makes it a bit more troublesome if you use sub-categories but considering that MS Money does not even allow sub-categories Quicken is ahead in this aspect.

Overall I'm pretty impressed by Quicken 2008, it does everything I want it to do, which is to keep track of every penny I spend and give me good reports on where the heck my money goes.

[Lynnae]

I used Quicken for a while, but I didn't like it, because it was hard to track what I had left to spend each month for each budget category.

I recently started using YNAB, and I like it a lot.

[Megan]

I use Microsoft Money to manage my accounts and my investments, but I use YNAB to manage my budget. I really like it. It's kept me on track the past few months.

[Rebecca]

I love mint. I'm totally hooked.

[Gootsy]

Does my brain count?

I use a pen and pad, and gnucash.