There are a lot of online personal finance tools out there that will help make your personal finance life a little more efficient. You have, of course, the headliner in Mint.com, now owned by Intuit, to help track all of your spending. You have a litany of budgeting tools, like You Need a Budget, and they’ve all been popular because the idea of online privacy has been flipped on its head with the popularity of Facebook.

I have been asked, on occasion, which tools I use. I don’t use any of them.

(Click to continue reading…)

I recently received an email from Reader Donald asking if I could do a direct comparison between You Need A Budget (YNAB) and Quicken. Having recently used both to write a YNAB review and a Quicken 2010 review, I was familiar with both and could easily share my thoughts.

To add a little color to the discussion, which I hope you’ll join in on, is that Donald does his taxes using TurboTax and the potentially seamless integration of Quicken and TurboTax “hobbles” him from buying YNAB. Also, he has yet to take advantage of the 7-day free trial of YNAB (no email or registration required for the trial, you can download the application here). Finally, he does all his banking with a regional credit union in California and being able to pull banking records is an important feature.

(Click to continue reading…)

With the unceremonious shuttering of Microsoft Money a few months ago, a lot of former Microsoft Money customers are looking for alternatives. If you were using Microsoft Money Essentials, Plus Deluxe, Plus Premium, or Plus Home & Business, your software will still work but support will be gone.

Fortunately, there are a lot of alternatives in the online budgeting tool chest. After a recent Personal Finance Hour show all about budgeting, I took a look at several software tools. This post will cover all of them briefly to help you decide which might be right for you (and they are not ranked in any predefined order).

(Click to continue reading…)

This morning I published a You Need A Budget (YNAB) review explaining the YNAB methodology as well as a look inside the tool. If you’re thinking about buying it, I recommend that you download it and do the 7-day trial first. Don’t buy it sight unseen when there’s a 7-day trial available giving you full access to the tool, so click here to download it before paying.

Then, when you’re ready to upgrade YNAB, we have a special 10% off coupon code:

Also, YNAB 3.0, which is slated for a November release, will cost $59.95. If you buy YNAB 2.0 for $49.95, actually $44.96 after the 10% off promotional coupon code, then you will be upgraded to YNAB 3.0 absolutely free. YNAB 3.0 not only looks more visually appealing but will sport additional features like expanded report functionality over 2.0.

For years, my budget consisted of an Excel spreadsheet that documented every purchase I made every single day of the year. As a numbers guy, this wealth of data was amazing and helped me tweak my spending, find my financial leaks, and reach financial goals much sooner than I would have without budgeting. Since then, I’ve been tentatively using online personal finance tools because of the security issue and instead I rely on Quicken’s desktop application, which is one of the most comprehensive tools available.

What if you just want to maintain a budget? Enter You Need A Budget. You Need A Budget, often called YNAB, is a desktop budgeting software package that will help you set, maintain, and stick to a budget. It’s a much better version of what I used to hack together in an Excel spreadsheet.

(Click to continue reading…)