Hello,

There's another thread regarding software: quicken/ms money/etc here:
https://acurazine.com/forums/money-investing-17/money-management-software-ms-money-quicken-381356/

However, I just discovered personalcapital.com and it's quite nice.
I linked it into all my banks, credit cards, 401ks, etc, and I can see pretty much everything that I cared about with Microsoft money. This makes life a lot easier for me as I have money spread among 7 different places. Nice to see it all in one place.

Their hook is that they have financial advisors which you can hire to help manage your money (I believe they give one free session)

- Frank

 

i use the perscap app, aswell.
its nice.
its a cool neat app that helps you balance your money as all bills, accounts are in one place.

 

I use mint.com. Would you say this is better for managing your money?

 

I was investigating mint when I came across this web page:
http://investorjunkie.com/13093/pers...apital-review/

Apparently one advange mint.com has is some sort of budgeting tools.
You get charts/breakdowns in personal capital, but no alerts or anything like that.
Also, PC is only US banks.

Also one minus is that for one of my 401ks, i'm using one of their retirement indexes, and PC has no idea what that's all about. It lists the balances/changes/etc, but can't look up the fees/breakdown of the index itself.

 

I use Mint.

 

From what i'm looking at, PC is better for getting in-depth regarding investments, and mint.com seems to be better for getting in-depth about day to day expenses.

I'm going to create an account on both and compare.

 

Yeah, I don't use Mint for investment stuff. Purely to keep tabs on the day to day stuff and business expenses.

 

The only thing that is missing from every service I've used is cash flow forecast, which I use in MS Money. Someone needs to make a site that will allow you to enter recurring transactions and generate a forecast and I'd be able to ditch MS Money... but I probably wouldn't anyway.

 

With any of the financial software, how do you get around the fact that none of them know of a transaction until it gets posted into the account? When I write a check or use a Credit or Debit card, that money is now spent but the software doesn't yet know about the transaction for maybe days (in the case of a check).

 

I'm happy with Quicken, not worth the headache for me to switch to something else. Plus I'm not ready to let one company host all of my info in the cloud.

From time to time I do encrypt a copy of my data file and send it offsite for backup.

I haven't found this to be a problem because I don't have a debit card and I don't write checks at stores. So when I pay a bill I input it into Quicken at that time. I have a few recurring monthly bills that Quicken knows about and it can project my checking balance. I don't care if charges don't show up in Quicken for a few days since they are separate from my checking account.

 

That is a valid argument for desktop software and against online software. If you enter the TX right away, you know what your effective balance is. However, Mint notifies me usually the same day when something big happens on one of my accounts, like my paycheck deposit. With the exception of checks, most transactions would happen within a day or two.

 

The program isn't psychic. You either let it automatically note the check when it gets posted (hence the delay) or you manually enter checks yourself so that you can track them yourself.

I've written checks, but my bank account was never so low on cash that it made any difference when the check gets posted. And yes, checks sent in the mail can take quite a while before they get posted.

- Frank

 

Yea I use mint for my day to day tracking. I don't have much of an investment account yet that I need something more powerful. Maybe down the line i'll look into it.

 

So I've been messing around with both Mint and Personal Capital.
I'm going to keep using both, at different times.

Some thoughts:

1) The Mint widget of recent transactions is VERY nice and I'd argue should be a requirement for everyone's home tablet.
It's a real time track of your current expenses, which is mentally nice for tracking cash flow.
You can seew what's pending, what's cleared, and immediately spot dodgy transactions (forgotten subscriptions / identity theft/etc)

2) Or overall view, I really like the default home page for the personal capital app.
It has a list of all accounts, AND 'balance history over time' graphics for each category (net worth, credit cards, investments, etc).

Mint has the same stuff, but it's spread all over, and those graphs make a huge difference.
It's one thing to see your current balances. It's another to see a nice graphical chart of your net worth taking a dive when you abuse your credit card. Good wake up call. It's quite encouraging to literally see your 401ks going up too.



3) For more detailed analysis/planning, i.e. last 30 days by category, etc,
Mint is labeled a lot better and just easier to use. It's surprisingly clunky in PC, from what I can tell.

4) Since I'm boring and my investments are all indexes, the stock stuff in PC isn't as useful to me. So that's a wash.
The initial analysis was useful though, Mint's is pretty useless.

5) It's extremely dissapointing that neither app has tools for retirement planning. They both know how much you have in all your 401k accounts (I have a couple), how much you are depositing, and your income/etc. You'd think they would have a convenient calculator/chart that can do all the numbers. You can do it online with other tools, but you have to manually punch in everything.


- Frank

 

Just wanted to make a blurb about something nice I hadn't considered -

Let's say you yank $100 from an ATM - that'll be entered as a $100 withdrawal drop from checking.

let's say you have dinner for $20 in chinatown and it's cash only.
You can manually enter a $20 cash transaction, list it as a dinner expense, and it'll automatically reduce the last ATM withdrawal from $100 to $80, so it doesn't show as a "double dip" expense.

Very slick - Mint has this, as do I assume all the others.
Since it's a manual entry, however, you'd have to do it for every web site you use, if you use more than one.

- Frank

 

Intuit to Sell Its 'Quicken' Personal Finance Program