Debt Management Software

[Hut1]

Morning MF! ☕️ 🌞 

Curious to see what type of software people are using to track their personal finances. I just subscribed to QuickBooks, but it's a pain in the buttocks trying to create categories for personal finances instead of the preloaded business. I really just wanted something that would link to all accounts so I wouldn't have to manually enter. I'm essentially wanting to track our spending, budget & pay down debt. 

I looked at few online free apps like mint, but it makes me nervous tying my accounts to developers who aren't well established & sworn by. 

I'd love to hear your personal choices and pros and cons of each. 😊

TIA!

[iced]

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@Hut1 wrote:

Morning MF! ☕️ 🌞 

Curious to see what type of software people are using to track their personal finances. I just subscribed to QuickBooks, but it's a pain in the buttocks trying to create categories for personal finances instead of the preloaded business. I really just wanted something that would link to all accounts so I wouldn't have to manually enter. I'm essentially wanting to track our spending, budget & pay down debt. 

I looked at few online free apps like mint, but it makes me nervous tying my accounts to developers who aren't well established & sworn by. 

I'd love to hear your personal choices and pros and cons of each. 😊

TIA!

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I think my idea of finances differs somewhat from yours so I'm not sure how helpful my response will be.

I'm still largely relying on individual brokerage portals to manage my finances, so my approach is consolidation. I had stuff spread across 4 different brokerages, but will be reducing that to 1-2 in the next 6 months. At that point, I don't really need much more to keep track of what stocks I own or when dividends were paid because they're all visible, with auditing, from 1 or maybe 2 portals.

This obviously doesn't take into account checking or traditional savings, but checking is insignificant and ephemeral (see below), and the savings are really just for emergencies/rainy day and are a very small drop in the bigger bucket, so those are more or less non-factors in my financial management.

In terms of day-to-day or month-to-month debts/obligations, I don't really "manage" them at all. As someone in another thread put, I do something akin to a reverse budget. All monthly obligations are auto-paid as soon as cash hits checking, and all savings are pulled out automatically prior to net pay. That is to say, I can't really overspend to a point where I miss monthly payments or can't cover them because they're all covered prior to me receiving any funds to overspend in the first place. My checking balance is entirely discretionary funds.

[Hut1]

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@iced wrote:

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@Hut1 wrote:

Morning MF! ☕️ 🌞 

Curious to see what type of software people are using to track their personal finances. I just subscribed to QuickBooks, but it's a pain in the buttocks trying to create categories for personal finances instead of the preloaded business. I really just wanted something that would link to all accounts so I wouldn't have to manually enter. I'm essentially wanting to track our spending, budget & pay down debt. 

I looked at few online free apps like mint, but it makes me nervous tying my accounts to developers who aren't well established & sworn by. 

I'd love to hear your personal choices and pros and cons of each. 😊

TIA!

---

I think my idea of finances differs somewhat from yours so I'm not sure how helpful my response will be.

I'm still largely relying on individual brokerage portals to manage my finances, so my approach is consolidation. I had stuff spread across 4 different brokerages, but will be reducing that to 1-2 in the next 6 months. At that point, I don't really need much more to keep track of what stocks I own or when dividends were paid because they're all visible, with auditing, from 1 or maybe 2 portals.

This obviously doesn't take into account checking or traditional savings, but checking is insignificant and ephemeral (see below), and the savings are really just for emergencies/rainy day and are a very small drop in the bigger bucket, so those are more or less non-factors in my financial management.

In terms of day-to-day or month-to-month debts/obligations, I don't really "manage" them at all. As someone in another thread put, I do something akin to a reverse budget. All monthly obligations are auto-paid as soon as cash hits checking, and all savings are pulled out automatically prior to net pay. That is to say, I can't really overspend to a point where I miss monthly payments or can't cover them because they're all covered prior to me receiving any funds to overspend in the first place. My checking balance is entirely discretionary funds.

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That's the goal I'm moving towards. As of right now, no stocks or investments and no savings. We throw all of our discretionary income towards paying off debt. It would be awesome to get more organized cause we've never stuck to a budget. We're bringing in about $7.5K/mo and paying out around $4K in bills. That additional $3.5K just gets destroyed by needless spending. I want to get that in check cause there's no way we can't pay down $30K debt with that type of income. 

[Hut1]

Anyone had any experience with YNAB and Undebt.it?

[Shooting-For-800]

Does Quicken still exist?

It was kind of the personal version of QuickBooks.

[ToxikPH]

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@Hut1 wrote:
Anyone had any experience with YNAB and Undebt.it?

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I use them both. Loving YNAB as I just got back into it and allowing myself some spending money has taken away a lot of stress. It does require a lot of nurturing though in order to follow it correctly. I would suggest picking up the book by the same name (it may even be on the YNAB site). Undebt.it I haven't put a lot of time in recently and it shows as my balances are not going down. I don't pay for the YNAB integration as I just got back into it but as I'll be 100% together this next month then I'll probably pay for the $12/yr plan and get it together. Both are useful tools and YNAB has a serious following! r/ynab

[RSX]

This one isn't automated but I find it easy to use.  

i use the Debt Reduction one

https://www.vertex42.com/Calculators/debt-calculators.html

[wwalter2718]

Since the focus is on debt reduction, I really recommend you give a try to the website payoff.io.

You can enter all your debts along with interest rate(s) on each ("rates" because it allows for a promotional rate with linked expiration date for each). When I had numerous 0% balances on multiple credit cards for varying periods of time, I found this tremendously helpful.

No identifying info is needed, just a name for the debt & associated rates/periods. E.g., I had multiple promo balances on a single card, each with its own expiration date, so I just called them "card1 tranche1, card1 tranche2, etc.

You also enter how many monthly dollars you have to apply to everything. It'll print out exactly what payment to make on each debt to minimize interest costs (making it, a sort of automated "avalanche" tool.) You can also schedule extra pmts, one-time or monthly, and see their effects years down the road.

I haven't used it in a couple years (because it *worked* for me!), but I just stopped by & it looks the same as before. I have no connection to the author, except as a thankful user.
Dio

[Revelate]

YNAB is brilliant as a budgeting and debt management tool; I wasn't their target demographic but it was really the first tool that I found and used that I could really see where things were going even though I had a pretty good handle on my expenses anyway.

It's just not very useful though for investors of any sort or generalized finances.  As a result about a year ago I wound up trying Personal Capital and haven't ever looked back.  I do have to re-characterize some transactions but that's supremely easy to do and it gives me some data analysis in graphical format that I just don't get anything similar out of YNAB... and I had to do that in YNAB anyway.

Yeah, it's trusting someone with some account information but when I really looked at it I'm doing that anyway with a bunch of different things in my life, and as such a data aggregation point doesn't scare me much.  End of the day for giggles I just pulled up my year to date expenses in Personal Capital: no mess, no fuss, couple of taps on my phone. It misses some things like the fact that my income and my

travel expenses are both inflated because almost all of it is reimbursable, but ultimately the cash flow line is what matters to me and incidentally that is the first tab too for that section. 

After that it's pretty easy to dig down into details: just a quick glance and I know where I've been sloppy and stupid over the year.