One thing I have seen a lack of is recommendation of good tools for the modern, web-savvy crowd. I’m sorry, but Quicken sucks (at least on Mac it did), and most banking software is horrible to use, and takes too much time. If I counted opportunity cost of how much time it took to manage my money using some of these tools, I’d be worse off in debt! At any rate, these are the tools I will be using, and for what purpose. They are likely to change over time, and I will try to give good reviews of them on blog posts.
1. Spending analysis - I could spend 5 hours updating Quicken to see what I’ve spent money on and use their arcane ledger system to tediously update every little payment I’ve made (I use my debit card for everything, and thus have hundreds of transactions in a few months). And I could pay $60 to do that, along with having to manually import my bank records since most financial institutions don’t do the auto-login thing in Quicken. Or, I could use Wesabe, a free new web2.0-ish utility that is pretty dang slick. It presents you with transactions, you give them descriptive tags, and it has pretty graphs and charts showing where your money is going, in both big and small categories. You can have as few or as many tags as you wish. A new potential competitor to Wesabe appears to be Mint, which I can’t wait to see the beta for. It’s about time some startups realized that new web design principles will work wonders towards a new way to do finances.
2. Budget - One thing Wesabe seemingly lacks is a simple budgeting tool. I don’t want to micromanage a-la Quicken; most of my bills are a fairly stable amount and I can give static numbers up-front. Well, I found no good budgeting tools around, so I resorted to Excel. Wesabe allows you to set spending limits on certain categories, so I trimmed down my tags to only the main categories, and set the limits after putting them in my Excel budget sheet. Really, a budget is simple, and it’s not like Wesabe couldn’t add in one extra page that was a consolidated budget sheet. It knows how much you make, how much you spend, why not put all the sliders on one page? Maybe Mint will fix that.
3. Debt Repayment - Oh my God, is there a lack of good tools for this. If you want to use the snowball plan from Dave Ramsey, there are a few Excel spreadsheets you can use, if you happen to like using spreadsheets that look like they were forged in the fires of Mordor. Here’s what I did: I listed all my accounts in Excel, the %APR for each, the total amount owed, and the minimum balance. I update this each month, always pay the minimums, and decide which account will get my extra repayment money based on whatever criteria I see (if I get close to zero balance, I’ll pay the sucker off, otherwise I’ll use highest interest rate).
Currently, that’s all I’m using. However, #3 is what I see a major lack in, outside of bad Excel sheets and online calculators from 1999. My plan, if people are interested, is to create a new web application that does all that for you! You update it each month with any new information (apr decreases, new balance, minimums), select criteria you want to pay them off by, and then get an email alert when you choose to remind yourself who gets what, and then another when the month is over. Simple! Effective! Simple! And hopefully free, or at least ad based. I’ll be working on it, it shouldn’t take more than a few months, and put it up here when I’m done. If there’s interest, I would create actual software to do the same, for PC or Mac. Let me know if you’re interested in either.
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