I used MS Money '97 for a long time. It was bundled in with one of my earlier PCs and I’ve used it since then. However, I stopped using when I got a Vista PC because it had some wonky behaviours. I could spend some money to get the latest version of Money or Quicken, but I was thinking of going the free / open source route.
The reigning application would appear to be GnuCash which can now run on Windows. I was wondering if anybody here uses it. Are there others I should consider?
I was actually going to ask if anyone had heard of (or used) Mint.com. Supposedly it is a very fast growing money management website that has some decent backing.
Edit: Time listed Mint as one of 50 best websites of 2009. (of course we all know how good Time.com polls are)
http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1918031_1918016_1917991,00.html
I don’t want to manage my money through some fancy Web 2.0 facility. What I want is software installed on my computer and with the database stored on my drive.
Mint.com doesn’t support Canadian banks, so I don’t think it’s a viable solution for Tim. It’s unfortunately, because it sounds pretty awesome.
I use and like Wesabe, but there are some things that are a little irritating. I keep meaning to check out Mint.com.
Mint is pretty cool, it’s worth at least looking into.
Just to be clear, I am not looking for online services no matter how free or awesomely cool. So Mint.com is out for that reason as well as not being available for Canadians. Wesabe appears also to be an online app so I’m not interested in that either.
I used Quicken for four years, Money for another three after that, and switched to Mint about a year ago. It has limitations (it doesn’t really handle loans well; it doesn’t let you hand-enter transactions), but if you work within those limitations, it’s better than both Quicken and Money.
Then you’re scrod. Nobody’s making personal finance apps any more, or at least not anybody who cares about them. Microsoft discontinued Money entirely. Intuit is focusing on the online version of Quicken. And GnuCash is a joke.
(Evidence for last assertion: The first bulletpoint on their list of features for the latest release is “In addition to the XML backend, Gnucash can now use a SQLite3, MySQL or PostgreSQL database to store the data. This is a new implementation using libdbi. It supports all features including the business features. In order to build with this, add --enable-dbi to the configure command. In addition to the libdbi-dev package for your distribution, you will also need the appropriate DBD (libdbi driver) package for sqlite3, mysql or postgresql.” The second bullet point is that you can use WebKit instead of GtkHTML. Um.)
Tim, why aren’t you looking for online services?
THOSE BASTARDS!
I’ve got the latest version of Money, which is being discontinued. From what I can tell, this version does most of what I want a financial management program to do and plenty more that I don’t want. I don’t use any of the automatic bill pay stuff. I just use it to record my data and review charts or retrieve receipts.
The problem is that he wants it to be free and also offline, meaning boxed. Boxes cost money, CD’s cost money, companies don’t usually ship boxed software with ads that the person has to look at before buying the product, so how is a company going to make money giving away boxed software?
Because he doesn’t want the collection of all of his personal financial information to be stored on someone else’s machine. It’s fine if bank A has all of his accounts related to bank A and bank B has all of his accounts related to bank B, but he doesn’t want Corp C to be the location of both of those aggregated together.
Makes perfect sense to me.
Yes except it doesn’t make sense from a business point of view. I’d like to have everything for free and never look at another ad. Can you help me out? :)
yodlee supports canadian banks now.
Do you use it? Is it any good?
Haven’t we had this conversation several times already? Not that it’s not worth having again…
I remember trying Mint.com out after the last Quicken thread came up.
It was fine. Did what was advertised on the tin.
http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/5-free-financial-software-alternative-to-quicken/
Would any of these work? I know there is a basic program my brother uses for linux and I can’t find it at the moment.
Edit: I think my brother uses KMyMoney. Not sure if Linux is an option…
I’m debating this too and it seems to come down to Quicken Online (free) and Mint.com.
Mostly I’m concerned about the ease-of-use/functionality of the iphone apps for both. I want something that makes it easy for me to track my budget and accounts on the go. I haven’t found a good comparison of the two that’s recent - and they’ve both had a number of updates in the past year.
I don’t suppose anyone here has used one or the other iphone apps and has any opinions?