Personal Finance Software Packages

In an earlier blog, I spoke about the use of tracking your expenses. Knowledge is power and if you know what your financial circumstances are and what you can afford to spend, it makes saving and wealth building much easier.


With the course, we were given the expense tracker assignment to follow the movements of our incomes and expenditures. It was briefly spoken about and I went off and researched it.


Microsoft Money was the first financial software I researched. "Microsoft Money Plus is no longer available for purchase. All purchased Money Plus products must be activated prior to Jan. 31, 2011. Online services extensions are no longer available for Money Plus." (http://www.microsoft.com/money/default.mspx) Thus, I don't think there's much point to trying to locate it.


Secondly, whilst researching I realised that most programs you have to PAY for to track your money. So I decided to just research the free programs. At the moment, I don't need a sophisticated program as I don't have a complicated income or expenditure. In the future, I will look further into different programs that can amalgamate all my financial costs such as saving, mortgage, expenses, deferred saving, credit cards, car insurance and health insurance.


As a student, FREE is beautiful.


The first software program I looked at was http://www.mint.com/. This had many good reviews. I liked the setup. However when I tried creating an account you needed a zipcode, thus it was more suited to the American market.


The second site I looked at in detail was http://www.clearcheckbook.com/. This was suitable for people from many countries as they had many currency types. However, when you looked further into the site you realised that for you needed premium membership to get all the benefits of the site. Thus, it is no longer free.


Third site was http://www.myspendingplan.com/. This once again needed a zipcode so not useful for Australian residents.


The fourth site I looked at and eventually joined was https://money.strands.com/. I quite like this site. It is secure, Mc Afee protects the website so you don't need to worry about getting hacked. As the program is over the internet, you can access it anywhere you have an internet connection. The first thing you do is add accounts. This site is also American based but it is very user friendly to people from other countries. One thing I did not like was that my totals were slightly off. This is because for one of my transactions that was a bpay from my savings account to pay a bill, they added it to my credit card payment. So a few things will need to be changed manually. This program also creates pie charts of your costs but you will need to manually change some of the categories they are in if the website interprets them wrong. However, this is still a great device they have. They also have lots of other sections so it's quite impressive for a student who has never used such a tool before.