Budgeting isn’t fun. Very few people look forward to tracking all of their purchases, cutting back when they’ve overspent, and adjusting their budget from month to month to meet changing conditions. However, it’s a necessary chore, like cleaning your house or apartment, that you should do because it’s good for your financial health. But so is exercising and according to the Department of Health & Human Services, we as a nation aren’t doing such a great job at that.

When I first started working, I was a very diligent budgeter. I recorded every single expense in a document called a Budget Bible, built from a template my friend Melinda sent me. I budgeted to the penny, the most labor intensive of the five budgeting systems I once wrote about. I kept it up for about six months but eventually I grew tired of it. It was important to budget to get a better handle on my finances, but once I had a handle the daily routine was unnecessary. I went from the most diligent of budgeters to a non-budgeter!

So how do I get back on the wagon? How does a personal finance blogger reform?

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When Intuit offered up three copies each of Quicken Premier 2009 and TurboTax, I jumped at the chance to give away more free stuff to you all. We’re deep into tax season and with the economy where it is, I’m sure everyone is looking for a little edge. Intuit’s been very generous with Bargaineering readers, already I’ve given away two copies of Quicken Premier 2009, one to a forum participant and another to a commenter in the Your Take question on money management software.

The Quicken Premier 2009 and TurboTax Packs contain a CD containing Quicken Premier 2009 and a pre-paid access card to TurboTax Deluxe (both federal and state!) edition. Quicken Premier has a retail value of $80 and TurboTax Deluxe, federal and state, is worth at least $65 – so these packs are worth almost a hundred and fifty dollars!

So, how do you win? It’s easy.

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When I started working five years ago, I tracked my spending down to the penny. I wrote about my “Budget Bible” before when talking about financial leaks. I felt that tracking my spending down to the penny was a great way for me to identify the areas I was spending and gave me an opportunity to review those areas. I didn’t realize it but that Excel spreadsheet was my first foray into money management software!

Back in 2003, there weren’t many personal finance tools out there. The tools that did exist were young and untested. Nowadays, there are plenty of personal finance tools available to help you manage your money! You have the beautiful, feature-rich, venture-backed Mint.com, you have the big branded cash flow focused Quicken Online, and you have the relative gray beard of the bunch, Yodlee, all at your disposal.

Of the three, I’ve played with Mint.com and Quicken Online and use them sparingly. My question for you, on this fine Friday, is – Do you use money management software? Either online or offline? If so, which one? If not, why not?

As for this week’s bribe, I have a copy of Quicken Premier 2009 to give away to one lucky commenter. You don’t have to say you use Quicken or that you’ll try Quicken Online, you just need to leave a comment and share which software you use or if you don’t use any at all! Contest closes in one week, February 27th, and it’s void where prohibited. Good luck!

(Photo: paulworthington)

The Bargaineering Forums have been a hit so far, with over 60 members and numerous active discussions. Readers have been able to post their questions and get a myriad of opinions. I wanted to reiterate that we have a giveaway going on too. On February 13th, I will randomly select one forum participant with at least five forum posts to receive a CD containing a full service copy of Quicken Premier 2009 – an $80 value. If you want to give it as a Valentine’s gift, by all means, but I don’t recommend it!

And if there are any bloggers (or future bloggers) out there, we’ve also created a Blogging forum where you can post your questions, ideas, thoughts, whatever. If you have any blogging questions, it’s the place to post it because we have some of the top personal finance bloggers checking the forums every day!

If you have never used a Quicken Premier product, I have to warn you… it’s very powerful. It has a lot of tools and a lot of features that will be able to give you a very good idea of where you are in your finances, how you are performing against your goals, and everything you need to handle your money on a daily basis. That said, it can also be a little intimidating at first. The $80 price tag is well worth it, as anyone who has come to appreciate the power of Quicken can tell you, but it may be overkill if you have no idea where to start when it comes to managing your money. I don’t want to dissuade you from entering the giveaway or buying the product, far from it, but I want you to be prepared for it should you buy or win it.

If you are familiar with managing your money but only have a few things to track (some bank accounts, a few bills, a 401k), it might be a great tool for you because you can play with the tool a little bit each day. The nice thing about the tool, over the online version, is that all the data is stored locally and only used to interface with other financial institutions. If you’re not comfortable with saving your sensitive data online, despite it being encrypted and protected, this is definitely the best option for you.

If you’re just starting out, you might want to cut your teeth on Quicken Online. It’s absolutely free and is similar to other online money management applications except there’s a heavy emphasis on cash flow management. They are very much focused on helping you manage your cash flow, from your paychecks coming in to your regular bills going out, so that you don’t find yourself in a financially precarious position. I just saw a quick demo of the product from their PR team, as well as a first look at their new iPhone application, and I’ll be discussing that later in the week.

Good luck!

Quicken 2009: The Missing Manual by Bonnie Biafore is part of the O’Reilly Missing Manual series and focuses on the popular personal finance application – Quicken 2009.

I’m not a Quicken junkie by any means but I have no idea how people were able to figure things out about Quicken before a book like this. Quicken has grown to be a very complicated and powerful personal finance tool if you know how to use it. Personal finance, in some respects, is complicated and so it’s understandable that a tool used to track your own finances would need to be equally complicated in order to be useful. What’s amazing about this missing manual is that it explains how to complete complex tasks with ease. It really lives up to its billing as a missing manual.

The book utilizes a lot of screenshots in its instructions (unfortunately, they are in black and white) on how to complete things so it’ll be difficult for me to pull out an examples to show you. I’m certain that if you were to visit your local bookstore, you’d probably find it there and can flip through it yourself.

As a testament to both Quicken and Bonnie, this book is remarkably specific in what it explains. Just looking at the Investment chapter, which is about 70 pages of the 550 pages, there are instructions on how to record stock splits, dividend reinvestments, mergers, acquisitions, stock options, etc. All those complicated situations that probably happen once or twice a year (perhaps not dividend reinvestments) that I would normally just figure out a hack for are explained very clearly in the book.

I think that if you want to get the most out of Quicken and don’t want to resort to little hacks, you’ll want to have this book by your side. I’m not a Quicken power user so I can’t really speak to the full utility of the book but I’ve always found O’Reilly books to be extremely valuable in almost any technical realm.

If you haven’t updated your copy of Quicken lately, don’t order it without checking out these Quicken 2009 coupons.

Quicken Online is now absolutely free, joining the pantheon of free online personal finance management applications (we reviewed Mint recently too). Until Monday (October 13th), Quicken Online had a free trial offer month and then was $2.99 a month. With the recent competition, I’m not surprised that they made the service absolutely free.

I was able to shortcut the account sign up process because I used TurboTax in the past. If you were a previous Quicken Online or TurboTax customer (or any other online Intuit product customer), you can use your login to sign up for Quicken Online.

For the most part, it seems a lot like every other available personal finance management tool. You can pull in your account data automatically (It appears that Quicken uses the same security precautions as Mint, according to the information they provide on their privacy page) and categorize your purchases according to your needs.

Quicken Beam

Quicken Beam is a cool little feature that lets you check your account balances from your phone. I didn’t try it out but here’s the FAQ for it.

Why Quicken Online?

With little differentiation, why sign up for this service over the others? Brand name and cross compatibility with other Quicken products. With the brand name, you have some assurances that if there is a problem with security, you have some financial recourse. Many of the other management software companies are VC funded.

I don’t know how Quicken Online plugs into other services but it would be useful if it could do things like auto populate 1099-INT fields and any capital gains/losses into TurboTax. I’m sure something like that is coming in the future, if it’s not in there already, and that’s certainly a strong reason to use Quicken Online. Plus, it’s free!

Here are some other Quicken Online reviews:

• StopBuyingCrap: Quicken Online Now Free
• ConsumerismCommentary: The New Quicken Online
• GetRichSlowly: An Introduction to Quicken Online
• ArsTechnica: Hands on: Mint.com vs. Quicken Online

Overall, I was very impressed with both the feature set and beauty of Mint.com. While aesthetics isn’t the reason why you use a tool like Mint, having a smooth interface certain improves the user experience and I, for one, appreciated how responsive the site was. It makes heavy use of AJAX, which allows you to navigate the site while the back-end does its information gathering.

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I picked up a copy of Quicken last year to help with our family’s personal finances and perhaps assist in the accounting of my fledgling little business. This year, Quicken has released yet another version update, Quicken 2009 is slated for a September 10th release, and offered some handsome discounts for those looking to upgrade or use the software for the first time.

Quicken 2009 New Features

I’ve read people talk about how they hated all these yearly updates because they offered little in upgrades. Well, in scouring the web for more information, I stumbled on this job posting in which Intuit, makers of Quicken, is “planning a major redesign of the product, and we are looking for a senior user interaction designer for 6-9 month.” Who knows what that means though.

There are additional portfolio planning features added, a whole new help system (with screens for each page), as well as adding more banks to its system. Quicken 2009 will now interface with over 6,000 institutions from banks to brokerages to PayPal.

Quicken 2009 Coupons Codes

• Quicken Deluxe 2009 ($59.99 $39.99)
• Quicken Premier 2009 ($89.99 $69.99)
• Quicken Home & Business 2009 ($99.99 $79.99)
• Quicken Home and Inventory Manager ($29.99 $23.99)
• Quicken Mac ($49.99 $33.99)
• Quicken Medical Expense Manager ($69.99 $44.79)
• Quicken Rental Property Manager ($149.99 $129.99)
• Quicken Online (FREE 60 day free trial, then $2.99/month)

Last night I had a flat tire and drove my donut-riding self over to Costco where they were able to plug the leak. (I love buying tires at Costco, especially now that they opened a store right by my house!) While they were fixing the leak, I had 45 minutes to kill and wandered around the warehouse. I meandered over to the tax section and picked up a copy of Quicken 2007 Home & Business. I’ve been meaning to get some sort of tax software package (Nickel raves about it and his 2304982039 years of data) and wasn’t sure if I should go with Quicken 2008 or Quickbooks. I decided I would read reviews, install the Quickbooks Simple Start trial and then install Quicken 2007 to do a real comparison.

My Needs

A lot of people have sworn by personal finance management software like Quicken but I had never tried it for myself. The main reason is because I didn’t want to spend money on software that would manage a process I already had a good handle on. Part of it was learning curve, part of it was me being cheap, but that all came to a head as I felt I needed some sort of accounting software for my side business.

Quickbooks

Quickbooks is powerful. If you run a business with inventories, invoices, and the full “light” nine – Quickbooks blows Quicken away. Quickbooks has great reporting features and some niceties that Quicken simply wasn’t designed for. For example, with Quickbooks you itemize all of your invoices and then all of your collections separately. If you perform work, you send out an invoice. When you receive a check, you record the collection (and this was just with their simplest package, Quickbooks Simple Start!). There are also a lot of great features behind the scenes such as the ability to export accounting versions and have that data sync back up after your accountant has worked with the books. Ultimately, Quickbooks is for the serious business owner looking to have a little more control over their books. If you’re a serious serious business owner, you probably want to outsource your accounting (who knows, I’m not at that level in terms of accounting complexity so I’m not a good person to rely on for that recommendation).

Quicken

Quicken is a personal finance management application first and accounting package second, even with the “Business” label. For my business, which has few invoices, no inventory, and a simple accounting structure, it’s perfect. For our personal finances, it’s great in that it has integration with nearly ever bank, company, or brokerage we work with (I have yet to find one it doesn’t integrate with) so I no longer need to log into my accounts via the web, Quicken does it for me, downloads the data, and integrates it with all the other data.

Verdict: Quicken

With a simple business structure and a need for personal finance management, I felt that Quicken was the right version for me. It cost a mere $70 at Costco, which will be tax deductible, it was a discount compared to Amazon or Intuit.

I just published a list of Quicken 2009 discount codes that can save you some cash if you’re looking to get the newest edition.

Why Not Online Versions?

I know the online versions are secure and I know sites like Mint.com are free, but I don’t like the idea of having my data stored elsewhere. (Mint doesn’t store anything, they leverage Yodlee, but the data is still floating around out there) Is this irrational? Perhaps, but I surrender little by leaving it locally on my hard drive.

I have yet to fully play with all the features Quicken provides but I hope to in the coming weeks (after the honeymoon). I know there are a lot of Quicken guru’s out there so please share any tips or hacks you may have (like this one by Nickel on how he manages his various CDs), thanks!