The recent desk upgrade and interest in making large purchases (bike, MacBook Pro, house) spurred me to start keeping track of my finances in a way that I could forecast and see what I was spending money on each month. I have a copy of Microsoft Money so I chose to use that. So far it seems like a typical Microsoft product. It has a lot of features that I most likely will never use, the basic tools to input individual income and expenses are easy, but when you start to use the budgeting, forecasting, and reporting tools along with automatic downloads, glitches tend to happen. For example, I setup my online banking and credit accounts so Money can automatically download my statements each month. This worked well, and other than having my 'Payee' and 'Memo' fields flipped, I was pretty happy with the ease of the task. Then I started to set up my budget information including recurring bills and income. Then Money asked me if I wanted to have my taxes tracked to get an estimate for this years taxes. I thought, why not? It would be handy to know approximately how much I would have to pay or would get back. So I grabbed my latest pay stub, input my gross income, pre-tax deductions, taxes, and post-tax deductions, click and done. Then I go back to the main line item list and hover over my latest paycheck item... Click: would you like to add this as a recurring item? Um... I thought I just did, but sure I guess. Rinse and repeat. Go back to the budget page. What happened to my income (input twice already)? Geez I guess I have to do it again! Third time through the process. Now I go to the budget area and I have three recurring income items! Well isn't that special? Microsoft thought that I should be getting paid triple, what a tease. Once that got cleared up things moved a bit faster. One thing I did like in particular was that you can add financial goals to your budget and set dates for them. So I added in things like "bike", "house", and "Europe trip with Wendy and Brad" then I set dates ranging from now to three years from now.
I'm still sifting out which tools I want to really use and which ones are just fluff to me, but the ability to automatically download my statements shows much promise for continued use.
1 comment:
Good to see some posts here again ;-)
I have actually been singing the praises of Microsoft Money for about 10 years now. I started with Money 95, hung on desperately to Money 97 while rejecting later offerings until I made myself try 2003 for a week. I now have a copy of 2006, use nearly all of the features in it, and I'm not sure I could ever go back.
Once you get using more and more of the features, it really gives a full picture of your finances.
I haven't really had any issues to speak of in using it. Hopefully you will not have trouble as you move forward.
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