What Are Your Financial Tools?

By May 10, 2007

Over at Zen Habits there is some excellent discussion going on about which financial tools the readers use. What do you guys use for your budgeting needs?

Some tools that have been mentioned include, Google Docs, Excel, Wesabe, You Need A Budget. GNUcash…

Anyone using Ben’s budget spreadsheet? Share your tips in the comments and over at Zen Habits.—MEGHANN MARCO

Ask the Readers: What are your financial tools? [Zen Habits]
(Photo:amyadoyzie)

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Comments

  1. Holden Caulfield says:
    May 10, 2007 at 3:00 am

    I’ve had to make my own spreadsheet that is kind of disorganized but I’ve made it so I can plug my paycheck into one field and it will seperate based on percentages into how much I will have available for each type of expense. I will share a link for it here when I get home. Even has some pie charts and such.

  2. Timbojones says:
    May 10, 2007 at 4:48 am

    My mother gave me a copy of Quicken recently. I never would have bought it on my own, but it’s a great piece of software. I had some trouble getting started, but now I feel like everything is tracked and covered.

  3. zaq2g says:
    May 10, 2007 at 6:26 am

    for those readers who are just getting started with financial software, instead of quicken or ms money, read the following recent post:

    http://consumerist.com/consumer/notag/quicken-and-ms-money…

    and instead try something like GnuCash ( http://www.gnucash.org/ ). There are also others listed in this post: http://consumerist.com/consumer/budgets/7-free-personal-fi…

  4. 75Sasha says:
    May 10, 2007 at 11:40 am

    Does anyone know where that shirt is from or who makes it?
    Thanks in advance.

  5. Cap'n Jack says:
    May 10, 2007 at 1:14 pm

    I’ve always used a simple spreadsheet I made in Excel, which has the average amount of all of my utilities, all my other bills and loans, my approximate income for the month (ALWAYS 2 paychecks, then when I get 3 paychecks in one month – twice a year – it’s like getting free money!!), and then calculate what’s left over after a few hundred bucks for food and gas and entertainment. It always works.

    Recently I started using Quicken, which is nice if you want to visually see where all your money goes. It’s a big cumbersome trying to categorize all of my transactions, but the benefits are worth it. But yeah, basically it told me what I already knew, but what I didn’t know was how much money I could save by doing simple things like bringing lunch to work 4 out of 5 days, and only going out to dinner once over the weekend or every other weekend. So yeah, pretty helpful.

  6. mroach says:
    May 10, 2007 at 2:20 pm

    I use Money 2 for personal finance.
    http://www.jumsoft.com/money/

    I was previously using Cha-ching, but it quickly realized it was too lightweight and it was clearly a form over function (Web 2.0 generation) application that was more concerned with attaching photos to transactions than being able to sum up the transactions in an account properly (seriously, balances were *always* wrong)

    I use Yahoo! Finance for tracking stocks I own, stocks I’m going to buy, and stocks I’m keeping an eye on. I pay something like $13/month for real-time quotes so I can obsess over stocks all day.

  7. tracilyns says:
    May 10, 2007 at 3:10 pm

    i’m using yodlee right now. it’s free, tracks all of your accounts online, and you can enter pending charges (such as checks) so you have an accurate picture of how much money is in your account. i think it also does categories and budget tracking, but i haven’t tried those features yet. it also does bill-pay, which is nice. the only thing i haven’t figured out how to do is transfer money between accounts in yodlee, but that might not be a feature.

    http://moneycenter.yodlee.com