Personal Finance Software in 2022 - Ditching Quicken

what's up you guys i'm dan this is

frugal not cheap today we'll look at

personal finance software in 2022 why

i'm ditching quicken and what i'm moving

to

[Music]

so first we should talk about what the

point of personal finance software is in

the first place

and that really is uh just in order to

keep track of things right so

and to to make things easier by

aggregating all the information across

your various accounts so going back you

know my my personal uh history with this

kind of software dates back to 2006

at that time i was working as a

non-profit credit counselor and i was

helping people put together budgets and

you know work on their financial

situation and at the same time i was

seeing that i wasn't really making a

whole had a lot of headway in my own so

i decided to get my financial act

together and i got a piece of software

called microsoft money it's a great

piece of software we can see here an old

screenshot from it and

you know this is uh i think the

screenshot says june 2 2008 which is

kind of cool because here we are

you know in june of 2022

quite some years later

anyway i thought it was a wonderful

piece of software you could download

transactions from all of your different

accounts they would populate here it had

automatic categorization then you'd go

in and fix some categories and stuff

but you can see here the basic

basic dashboard was quite useful you had

a cash flow forecast down here which

would show you uh you know what are your

projected balances

do i have enough of a buffer in my

checking account to take care of all the

upcoming bills that are due

then we have a quick view of our

spending by category to see you know

have we been matching up with our budget

so far or not and then there's this

handy-dandy spending tracker um which

you could just put a few categories that

you really want to watch like maybe

groceries or restaurants or you know

whatever it is um that would be dating

for me like hey how much am i spending

on that anyway so these these um it had

just really really helpful uh dashboard

and also really helpful reporting and

transactions so the cash flow we talked

about it's got the credit center talk to

you know give you an idea of what's

going on with your credit score uh

lifetime planner very useful in terms of

retirement planning and there are events

uh then of course the budget right the

heart of personal finance software

generally you know okay to be able to

put that together and then track your

progress against it it had a debt

planner if you were paying down debts uh

what ifs other events that you could put

in here as well so it's a wonderful

piece of software but unfortunately i

think in 2009 or somewhere around there

they they stopped providing support for

it

meaning that you could still use the

software you could download the sunset

edition for free for a long time you

might still be able to actually

but there's no support and

and it didn't

update all the connections to all the

different financial institutions right

to all the banks and you know losing

that

losing the ability to download all the

transactions automatically and quickly

you know that's really a big big deal

for me where i have you know accounts of

many financial institutions if you had

everything with one it might be a lot

easier so you know that could still be

an option for you

anyway so with them being discontinued

then of course uh i went over to quicken

which is the topic of today's

discussion so uh this is quicken uh

unfortunately guys i've uh

right now at this stage i don't feel

comfortable sharing sort of every detail

about my financial life uh so i'm gonna

be hiding a lot of the the detail

on these screens and so that's why i

won't be moving around them a whole lot

as we go through

but generally you know we can see that

it's very similar to

what we had with microsoft money

where we have on the left you know all

of our different accounts and the

balances and they're broken out by

banking business investing

any other property and debt where i can

keep track for instance the value of my

vehicle natalia

so really really very uh very useful

and

they've modernized the dashboard a

little bit here so we can kind of see

income and expenses net worth over time

you can see the impact of the

of the recent declines in the stock

market on the portfolio which is also

tracked on this page uh and then my top

spending categories as well um and then

you know bill's incomes and transfers

the the scheduled things um that that

kind of recur that you know we want to

keep an eye on

so that's that's the handy dashboard and

that part is modern um

and and a lot of the other screens are

kind of more old-school and the stuff

that we used to see in microsoft money

and if we click on the spending tab then

we can take a look at our spending here

is my spending for the last 12 months

and so of course this is really really a

helpful piece of the quicken software

then we've got bills and income where we

can see a forecast of what the cash the

balances are going to be like in any of

your accounts i selected my main

checking account here so this is also

very useful as well we can enter in all

of our different bills

and then of course we can put in all our

incomes and transfers and scheduled

things transfers would be things like

payments to your credit card because

really all you're doing is moving money

from one account to another

it's not like an actual expenditure

in a sense you know what i mean you made

the you did the expenditure at the time

that you charged on the card and here as

i click on planning i would say that

really what clicking is it's a very

robust desktop application that can do a

ton of great stuff right so here we have

this retirement plan essentially and you

can you know put in all these different

kinds of assumptions and it's really

really quite useful as with microsoft

money then we also have you know this

debt reduction uh planner that we could

use if we had debt we also have the

ability to set different savings goals

and tie them to an account we've got an

area where we can plan out our taxes and

of course we've got the budgeting

feature we'll come back to that in a

little bit then you've got investing

where quicken is really full-featured in

terms of being able to track all of your

investments by lot all of the tax

consequences to look at your portfolio

in different ways it's got this

portfolio x-ray feature from morningstar

that is quite useful you look at the

performance the allocations it's got

investing dashboard and then we've got

the property and debt section which i

really think of as the net worth section

so of course property being your assets

and your debt being your liabilities and

then of course the

difference between those two being your

net worth so that's really what i think

about it here and it is a useful metric

to track over time

definitely and it's been really cool to

have the history going back all the way

to 2006 since i took my microsoft money

data imported into quicken took a lot of

work to get it to um to work right and

quicken but eventually i sort of got it

there

anyway really cool to have the history

going back from 2006 all the way to 2022

here in quicken so again lots of really

great features i would say for quicken

as a desktop piece of software but you

know now it's 2022 and of course the

landscape has changed and there are some

things that you know really kind of

bother me about quicken now and that's

why i'm ditching it and so we'll go

there so we'll go back recently i put

together a video on

what i spent in a year living here in

plano texas and i was as i was doing

that i was going through this spending

report but every time that i went to go

and customize that report to show only

the categories that i wanted to focus on

for the last year like here it's got

taxes obviously i don't want to include

taxes in there that's not a part of my

you know

regular spending that's just something

that you know comes off the top

and anytime i made a customization and

and i went back in there to then make a

new customization it would have

forgotten all the work that i did and i

went to some sort of default setting for

the report and i tried all kinds of

different things to make this work but

this really basic feature um and one of

the things that makes quick and useful

uh was now broken so that was pretty

frustrating in the end i just exported

all the data and then i used excel and

made pivot tables in order to create the

video so you would have noticed that

so that was one frustration but i was

like ah you know i should really give

quicken one more shot before i decide to

move away from it

so you know i got into quicken and i

decided i'm going to update

all of the stuff

and make sure that it's really up to

date and working so the two main areas

there were going to be to update my

budget and make sure that i had a

correct budget for the next 12 months

and second

was to sync everything online and to use

the mobile and web feature because it is

2022 and i would like to be able to

categorize transactions on the go on the

app or on a tablet or you know in this

chromebook as well

so we gave that a go and it did not go

well at all when trying to put this

budget together it kept throwing these

automatic categories that i didn't want

in there these kind of catch-all things

and adding these other things and it was

really hard to set the budget for the

entire year for a particular category

which it shouldn't be i mean just this

basic feature that should be really easy

to set up and like it's most competent

thing was just a frustrating nightmare

that i don't want to deal with so that

was strike one strike two was in setting

up all this mobile and web stuff

i got it going on the app and i got it

going online but when i logged into my

investment account online sorry when i

logged into quicken online and also on

the app it had different balances for

one of my investment accounts between

there and the desktop and you know i

looked at everything and there's just

nothing i could do to make the two line

up and it was just driving me nuts and

so that plus the fact that i couldn't

use the budget feature which is you know

really kind of one of the basic things

here with quicken that the reporting

wasn't saving my customizations and

working right

i just finally threw in the towel so i

would say that

quicken was a great piece of software on

desktop very very powerful you know very

feature rich

but it's become a buggy mess

it doesn't work with the online syncing

it's a nightmare you'll see that the

reviews for the app are terrible

terrible terrible

and on top of it all it's become much

more expensive so one of the things that

made me think about this is of course

in the past i used to be able to buy one

copy of quicken for around sixty dollars

and it would last me for the three years

that they provided support for it well

no more now it's sixty dollars a year so

for their subscription and supposedly

this means you get all the latest and

greatest features but in practice it's

just been a buggy mess a lot of times

when they push out an update for the

software it screws something up and i

have to go back and fix the transaction

record and so you know

it's just it just doesn't make sense

here in 2022 what you want is a

cloud-based piece of software

where there's only one database because

the way that quicken decided to do

things in their infinite wisdom

was that you'd have your database on

your computer

and then their cloud

database is a completely separate one

and they would try to sync these two

bi-directionally all the time which of

course causes sync issues right this is

one reason that i don't use onedrive at

my work we use sharepoint because that

way everything's coming from directly

from the cloud

and not

not through the having these two

separate copies with your onedrive which

is just a nonsense

implementation anyway

so yeah

threw in the towel and started looking

at all right what are the um

personal finance software options that

are out there now in 22 that i might

want to look at and i looked at some

anyway because

i've been working with my buddy sam on

his financial plan all right so i was

out there looking at different options

and looking at some videos and stuff and

of course one option would have been

mint

so mint is a you know a very well known

application is actually it's owned by

intuit which was the company that owned

quicken and then quicken got spun off

into its own thing

um but

so mint is you know

quicken basically on the web but it is

much less feature rich

it's

i find the interface to be way too busy

i don't know about you um i just there's

too much going on uh there's hold on

this is the mobile one which isn't that

bad but the here's the the desktop

interface and yeah there's just too much

going on

there's ads now of course because this

ad supported

but the big knock against it for me

anyway is that it doesn't keep track of

your investments well it'll keep track

of the balances but it does weird things

with

the transfers to your investment

accounts and all of the different

investment transactions it's just not

really geared towards that

if you're really hyper focused on your

budget

and maybe building an emergency fund or

paying down debt then i think it's a

good tool you know and it's free so you

can't beat that right and they're also

really good about maintaining

connectivity with all the different

financial institutions so i think it's

very much a good option out there it

just wasn't the one for me because one

again i don't really love the ui

two it's not good in investments um and

then three i'm much less focused on

being very

micromanaging and critical about my

budget i'd rather kind of focus more on

sort of broader cash flows and that

probably lets you know what my choice

ended up being but i looked at other

options too so i looked at the gnu cash

gnu cash it's an open source

accounting software

that i'm actually using for a non-profit

that i'm helping

they've been using excel spreadsheets um

yeah so anyway i set them up with

with new cash and it's it's much better

it's a lot like uh it's quickbooks but

it's free right and it doesn't sync up

with your banks automatically they have

a protocol to do it but it didn't work

for me with my bank maybe it does the

major ones anyway so i just download

an ofx or qfx or whatever

and then import the transactions and it

does a really good job of knowing you

know what are past transactions what are

new matching things up suggesting

categories

it's really it's a good piece of

software and i'm happy with it but

it would never work for me because again

i wouldn't be able to automatically

download all the transactions from all

these different banks and institutions

so that was out

cost is good though that's also free so

if you've got a small business something

to consider

the next one i looked at was something

called tiller which is newer

not that tiller

tiller

personal finance let's look for that

so this looked cool you know it looked

like it had a good dashboard it's very

customizable

and the basic idea is it's the plugin

that works either with excel or with

google sheets

so i gave it a shot and you know it's

relatively inexpensive there is a

subscription cost

um but to me it was just too clunky i

don't like the idea of using

spreadsheets for all of this

transaction data can get damaged

formulas can get broken it's just it's a

fragile way to to go about doing things

very flexible but also fragile and i

just didn't feel good about paying money

to to do that in this uh and yeah i just

yeah not for me so tiller was out um and

then you know there's a lot of other

ones out there i'll talk about one more

and then we'll talk about my choice just

because there's so many and maybe at one

point you know if you'd like let me know

in the comments below

i can do you know a more detailed review

of any of the different pieces of

personal finance software

but the other big one that i heard about

was winab

so i thought about that it's you need a

budget

i looked into you know the cost

which isn't terrible it's around 100 and

something dollars a year i think

again it's got a cool concept and the

concept is that it allocates all the

money that you already have

rather than the money that you expect to

be coming in and and so that way you've

already like in a sense funded um all of

the the things that need to be funded

right now right

so that concept is pretty cool it's

basically building up that buffer that

you need in your checking account in

order to take care of things

and people that really want to get in

the weeds and micromanage things it

looks like great software the reviews

from people that really get into it and

watch all the tutorials and learn how to

use it they seem to love it

doesn't look like it's for me like again

at this stage um maybe because you know

i've been on this personal finance

journey now uh since 2006 as we talked

about um

and for a lot of that time i can kind of

be an autopilot it's a little different

now because of the move but once i've

settled in i can kind of get on

autopilot in terms of where my spending

is and not getting out of line and it's

not that necessary for me to keep such a

close eye on it especially because

younger dan again did a lot of the work

in terms of

stashing away a lot

investing very steadily i'm still doing

that though

in order to to meet my future

personal finance goals so

basically even with the market decline

um young den has put us in a really good

position and all i need to do is just be

on autopilot and keep us on track

towards a good position later so kind of

the pressure's a little bit off is what

i'm saying

there's still pressure but the

pressure's off

so i ended up settling on personal

capital so you might have thought about

that because their their kind of thing

is more cash flow management they're not

into like doing a detailed categorized

budget

they're really into investments

and then of course you heard me balking

at the subscription costs well personal

capital is completely free

there is a catch of course and that

catches that they make their money by

selling financial services

their portfolio managers or wealth

advisors or what have you so they want

you to put assets with them and they

want you to um

then of course they take it they take a

fee for that right

that's not something i'm interested in

as you know very much i'm a diy investor

and i'm also a person that doesn't have

any trouble saying no so you do have to

give them a phone number when you sign

up uh they will contact you and i just

told them hey you know i love the

software it's really wonderful um but

i'm a diy investor and i'm very happy

with the way things are going i don't

need your surfaces thank you and that

was the end of that the guy was really

great he wasn't pushy it was a great

conversation and i haven't heard from

them since so i you know i did have them

way back in the day i recently got them

um got them back uh i got my a new

account set up more recently as i

decided to ditch quicken

here's the the dashboard immediately you

can see it's very similar to the other

pieces of software that we looked at

you've got all your accounts on the left

i've had to black it out so you can't

really see but there's actually they

have handy area charts uh of the

balances for each of the subcategories

so of your cash your investment your

credit

so if we scroll down then we can also

see

all of the the credit cards and any

other assets here i'm keeping track of

my car

you could add your home and track is the

estimate

all kinds of things and on the dashboard

you've got all of the things that you

might want to see

you've got your net worth over time you

can see the history just kind of

recently started

and of course it has been on the decline

the market has been a little difficult

and then we've got our budgeting and

they've got a unique approach to

budgeting so again it's much more

focused on the macro picture which i

like at this stage and so depending on

your personality and where you are that

might make more sense for you too

basically the budget line the spending

line is the circle

representing the month so it starts at

noon and that's you know the beginning

of the month and then the end of the

month is a full circle and you can see

i've already overspent for the month

i've spent over three grand this month

and that's because we had a lot of

insurance expenses that were due so i

paid for my auto

renters and i think umbrella or at least

two of those three anyway and so that

was 800 yeah 805 dollars so that was a

little bit uh extra and that put us over

but generally i'm targeting spending of

2 850.

and so yeah we're over that

and then you can see there it has the

number 22 of course i'm filming this on

june 22nd and you can see um you know

that's where it should be in theory is

the spending would be up to that point

or less

and then you can see where we were last

month the yellow line is where we were

last month you can see where we were at

this point in the dark yellow and then

the remaining shaded yellow portion

shows kind of where we ended up at the

end of the month because i didn't spend

um you know the full full amount last

month and it doesn't carry over month to

month or anything like that which is

fine it doesn't it doesn't have to to me

and then we have on the cash plus side

you can see you know where the income is

this month versus the expenses and how

that compares to last month as well and

if we scroll down then we can take a

look at you know our portfolio balances

over time of course that reflects very

much my net worth since yeah don't have

a lot of cash and those the cash would

be relatively static anyway

and then it's got your retirement

savings goals and you know how much uh

it thinks you've saved um to now

against your your goal and um you know

online uh there is an issue i've got a

vanguard 401k uh it doesn't track any

transactions in the 401k so it's got no

idea about how much i'm putting away

there

but you know that's happening so my goal

this year is to uh save around 50k if i

can

it thinks i've saved around 5000 in the

few months of data that it has but it's

missing again all my 401k contributions

and it's also missing all the data for

before i signed up for personal capital

or before it was able to pull historical

data from anyway

and then it's got an emergency fund it

says kind of where i should be

with it you can see that i'm below i had

some cash flow tightness related to

my rent and using the credit cards for

signup bonuses and so i had to

move some cash over in order to create a

sufficient buffer and then over the

coming weeks i'm going to be able to

move that back

into my my savings account anyway so

that's the dashboard i think it really

is quite useful

let me show you some of the other

components of personal capital

so of course the big one here is your

transactions so this pulls all the

transactions from everywhere in one

place and then you can categorize them

so that you can keep an eye on those

spending categories and even though you

know again we're not looking at uh where

are we for the budget line for each

category individually um it is useful

still though to be able to review how

the spending is going there on the app

uh you can of course quickly categorize

transactions and quickly get a glance at

things and quickly i'll say this is not

sponsored right none of my stuff is

sponsored um but you know there is a

referral link in the description in case

um you know you want to use it and

you're curious about the software i like

it but if you do again be prepared to uh

to tell them no when they call you to

try to offer you their services right

all right

so then we have the cash flow section

it's not quite as good as quicken and

microsoft money were in that it doesn't

show you where the balance of your

account is going to be it doesn't do

balance forecasting but it does show you

what cash flows have been like this

month what they were last my month and

so they they can give you an idea of

that so as long as you're not in danger

of you know running out of funds in an

account then this is still very useful

and that's why i keep personally a

buffer of about one month's worth of

expenses in my checking account

it does have a bills section

there's not a whole lot for it to to

catch for me

but you know it could be helpful for

your situation maybe

and then we have the budgeting section

which again is really useful

the

circle things are from you know the the

dashboard that we saw on the home page

but it does have the spending broken

down by categories here

as we can see

and it is helpful that if you toggle the

time range from this month to

one year

then it also toggles the budget amount

so we had previously our budget for the

month of you know i think was 28.50

now we're looking at my overall annual

budget of just around 34 000. so again

there's been a little lifestyle

inflation but you can see i'm still well

off of the uh roughly 40 000 to almost

40 thousand dollars that i spent in the

12 months through the end of may but we

had a lot of one-time expenses and

medical stuff going on that you know

knock on wood isn't going to occur so

yeah i think this is really great and

really just the right level of detail

needed

on the investing side here you can see

the different menu items you can look at

your holdings you can look at your

balances over time you can see the

performance and compare that against

benchmarks but i think the most useful

part of this

is the fact that it does look at your

portfolio holistically so a lot of

people i've noticed try to play little

mental accounting games where their 401k

has a certain asset allocation and it

might be you know more or less

conservative than their brokerage

account and which has a different asset

allocation and they talk about how oh my

my 401k is this my brokerage is that

it's just one portfolio right so you

know no matter how we want to slice and

dice in in their minds uh in the end um

we've just got one portfolio and in

aggregate it has just one asset

allocation so you know

yeah

let's not fool ourselves is what i'm

saying and so this does give you a very

quick view of your overall asset

allocation uh which we can see here so

really useful and then of course it also

has a

a tab for u.s sectors so here we can see

you know the u.s sector breakdown as

well which could be cool if you're

interested in sort of sector weights and

all that kind of stuff i can't be

bothered i just do you know your broader

index fonts then we have planning tools

and i don't want this video to get too

too long but i do want to quickly

highlight they do have that savings

planner like like in microsoft money and

quicken um it's got a cool retirement

fee analyzer you can see that my fees

are extremely low against the benchmark

and if you added on the fees from

personal capital then you know you'd see

a lot more loss to fees so yeah anyway

and they also have a cool investment

checkup tool which basically says you

know are you on the efficient frontier

is your international allocation too big

or too small by their standards i kind

of don't necessarily agree with all of

their analysis there but um you know i

think it is a useful tool anyway for

someone to get a look at but of course

the most useful tool for me is their

retirement planner so um this is this is

i think quite a good tool it gives you

your percentage chance of success you

can add all kinds of different things to

it so

you can add in new types of income along

the road or whenever so you might say

you're going to work some during

retirement

you might expect some pension income

some of you might have that i don't

you might expect to sell a property and

downsize at some point so you can model

all of that here in your retirement plan

and then on the expense side you can

also model a bunch of really cool stuff

here

you could model a charitable giving

supporting dependents

getting a new vehicle at some point your

vehicle might need to be replaced a

wedding for one of your children

or you might upgrade your home right or

healthcare expenses or education college

for your kids so all this stuff can be

built into uh the plan and so i think

that's a really great feature in

personal capital they do upsell you a

little bit the smart withdrawal thing is

not something that's available to us for

free that's only available to uh

people with the um

that have their wealth advisory services

but not a big deal i think really um you

can even make you know additional

scenarios and plans um so yeah all these

tools that are available here on the web

and then also on the app i really think

are quite great and of course one fear

you might have with something like this

that's offered for free is you know hey

is it gonna be around forever right

and um you know hopefully it'll be

around for a long time um it has been

already around for a long time i think i

don't know it's many years since i first

signed up with them

i kind of wish i'd never um

deleted that account because then i

would have the history from back then

well then they'd just it'd have the

history and then the giant gap when i

wasn't using it and then again

so yeah whatever it's okay um in the end

i think one of the lessons i've learned

in this whole thing from moving away

from quicken is that the historical data

doesn't really matter all that much of

course my cost basis on my brokerage

account very important to keep so i've

downloaded that from vanguard directly

so i have a copy of that but outside of

that it doesn't really matter how much

you spent on i don't know bubble gum in

1997 right like

it's okay i had a lot of sort of

sentimental value kind of locked up in

that and not letting go of quicken for

that reason but

i've come to see yeah not a big deal

it's fine as long as you know things are

well now and moving forward there's not

that much reason to to look backward and

unhappy right now with personal capital

they do have a couple billion dollars

under management by the way so their

business is doing okay uh and on top of

that they were recently bought by uh

this empower which i understand you know

is a larger company of course since they

bought them but offers other services

and so there's additional capital kind

of behind the business and so far i

haven't seen them mess with anything

here in terms of the ui so hopefully you

know the new owners aren't going to

meddle too much or if they do there will

be actually improvements i hope there

will be improvements to personal capital

but yeah very happy um you know if you

check it out let me know what you think

if you have other personal finance

options that you think people should

know about do let us know in the

comments below yeah if you if you did

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the next video

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