Personal Budget Software To Get Control |
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| By: alton buffington | ||||
Some of the best software for budget success is actually free. The Intuit Quicken online personal finance package actually is the same as the Mint.com system. Why free? They make their money by recommending ways to save money. The payoff for them is they get affiliate commissions from the recommendations. You don't have to buy anything though. Here's why this will work well for you. The online system lets you look at all your checking, savings, credit card and investment accounts together in one place. You do no bookkeeping yourself. It all gets updated automatically online. That does mean the system must interact with your accounts. Though most do, some don't. The Mint.com personal budget software program helps you with budgets with special reports, built-in calculators as well as video tutorials. You get reports and charts to help track spending and compare your spending to your budget. But what if you want something off-line that resides on your computer? Many personal finance software packages are more like bookkeeping systems and less help with budgeting. A popular budget system is the You Need A Budget (YNAB) Pro package. Most reviews of the YNAB program are widely positive. The whole thrust of the package is getting control of spending through what they describe as 4 steps. But the detractors maintain that the software itself is a tweaked spreadsheet that only really works as a budget tool and not as a replacement for a real accounting system. But if you have repeatedly tried to make a budget work and failed, know that the approach here seems to have worked for many people whereas they have failed with more conventional finance programs like Microsoft Money and Quicken. Microsoft Money is now gone but Quicken lives in several versions. The entry level Quicken Starter Edition may be best skipped. It tracks no loans other than credit cards and won't let you track investment accounts either. That means no mortgage tracking and no 401K either. Also the budget function lies well hidden in the software and the documentation is very weak. A better choice is the Quicken Deluxe. But the learning curve to put all this to use is quite formidable. Easy may not be the best description of any of the Quicken software. Though it does offer lots of features and it remains the leader in personal finance software. Check user reviews and you see many negative reviews. Many of the negatives relate to how difficult and cumbersome it is to use. Sadly, part of that probably just stems from the power of the package. It's just difficult to do many complicated functions in a simple manner. Remember that quicken purchased Mint to get an easy to use online personal finance package and maybe in the future some of those easy features will find their way to the other Quicken products. |
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| Article Source: http://business2u.co.za | ||||
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