dear lazyweb: personal finance software?

[dr_memory]

Dear Lazyweb:

Quicken?  Quicken Essentials?  Mint?  Moneydance?  GnuCash?  MS Money?  Some other thing I haven’t heard of?  Pimp your solutions at me, please: go!

In an ideal world, this would:

• have an iPhone app interface, so I can quickly add in things like restaurant bills
• do bill payment
• interface with my various bank/retirement accounts
• run on MacOS

Comments

[lightcastle]

Hate them all.

[lightcastle]

Mind you, that might be because I don't like having to give all my bank passwords to the programs, and I have no money anyway so them offering me "helpful tips" that assume I have an income make me want to kill all the developers and all my friends who are happier than me.

[catness]

Huh. I don't think I have ever given any software my bank passwords. Maybe I am doing it wrong.

[lightcastle]

Neither have I. But I have had almost every one of them ask for it "to make things easier".

[sweh]

What is it you want to do? I, personally, use check book balancer "cbb" (a very old TCL/TK application running under X). Does what I need and the datafiles are plain text so I can write my own reports (yearly, monthly, expected date of recurring bills, etc).

It's very very basic, but it works.

[syringavulgaris]

I use Moneydance. It is actually working and I am actually recording my expenditures and seeing where I go over budget and correcting it, something I have been historically terrible at. What praise more need I give?

Edit: I should note I do NOT use any of the Speaking To Online Banks features; I log everything by hand and cross-check it against what Chase is telling me.

reposted as me

[fivetonsflax]

Until I read your edit, I was ready to offer you cold, hard cash to help me set it up, since I've tried and failed.

But logging-by-hand is simply not gonna happen. :-)

Re: reposted as me

[sweh]

I found (a long time ago) that logging by hand is actually one of the best ways of staying within budget. Each time you use your credit card or get cash from the ATM then log it. It enforces the "oh, I spent money" attitude. It only takes 30 seconds :-)

In 1986 I wrote my own program to do this on my BBC Micro (heh, and it was even password protected and encrypted the data... using XOR. I knew about security, just not good implementations!) so I guess I've been doing this for 24 years or so, now. It's a habit now. One day I should convert my BBC data into CBB format so I have a running history that far back (I switched to CBB in 1992).

[t0rque]

Have been using Quicken for more than a decade. Love it. Could not function without it.

[the_xtina]

GnuCash.

Looking to write or cobble together a good web-based double-entry thing, because I want my own, on the web.