What Is The Best Personal Finance Software?

Our personal finances are understandably a topic which many of us worry over. After all, even a couple of (what seems like) relatively mistakes when handling our finances could have big consequences in the future.

Which is where personal finance software comes in! Such software can give you a great illustration of where your money has been, where it is currently, and where it will be going in the future with reports, graphs and more. The best personal finance/budget software can also link to your online bank and credit card accounts and - after initially setting them up - can make managing your finances much easier.

Clearly, your choice of which personal finance software to choose is an important one. This is because many of us think of financial software and instantly think that it will be complex to setup and use (hence getting an easy to use personal finance program will be very important). And in addition, naturally you'll want to choose a piece of software which is secure and has a good reputation.

As a result, we will look at a few different programs to help you answer the all important question of What is the best personal finance and budget software?

Microsoft Money

Microsoft Money is a software package that many people knew, many people used, and many people loved. It has/had all the features which make managing your personal finances easy (or as easy as a piece of software can make it, that is!), and it came from a reputable company (i.e. Microsoft) hence many people used it. Unfortunately, in 2009 Microsoft announced that have discontinuted the product.

You can still pick up older versions of it, although since there are no plans to upgrade (or support) it, we wouldn't recommend you buy Microsoft Money anymore as a result of its discontinuation. However if you are currently using it and you are happy with it, then we'd suggest you continue using it since it's still a good piece of software.

You Need A Budget

Screenshot from Amazon.com showing reviews of the You Need A Budget software

YNAB is a multi-platform software (i.e. one which can run on Windows, Mac OS X or Linux) which was started in 2003 and is now one of the fastest growing and popular personal finance programs around (as can be seen by the many happy reviews it receives on Amazon.com; see to right). It has all the usual features which you need to take charge of your personal finances, and much more.

It is based around a somewhat ideologically centred view of personal finance in that it has four unique and powerful rules (don't worry, they're easy to implement and remember!) which it helps its customers to apply via the software. And as the software clearly states, it all starts with helping you set a budget and then working towards sticking to it and eventually reducing your outgoings and increasing your incomings to help your personal finances grow and became healthier.

All-in-all this is a brilliant piece of software which we would fully recommend. It is easy to use and its strong principles help ensure that your home finances will be growing healthier as time goes on.

Quicken Deluxe 2010

Screenshot from Amazon.com showing reviews of the Quicken Deluxe 2010 software

Quicken have been producing personal finance software for many years now. However its recent products have unfortunately received a relatively large number of bad reviews. So much so that we unfortunately wouldn't recommend Quicken personal finance software to you, at least not right now.

To be exact, 51.3% of the reviews left on Amazon for Quicken Deluxe 2010 have been negative reviews (1 or 2 stars), and just 29 people (12.6% of the reviews) given the product 5-stars.

Hence whilst we could tell you about its features, we feel that its reviews speak for itself and thus - as above - we currently can't recommend Quick Deluxe. We will keep an eye on its future releases though and post an update if things improve.

Others

There are other personal finance software products out there on the market, although we didn't see any which we wanted to mention here (either because they have many bad reviews, don't have enough features to offer a complete solution, or it hasn't been updated in many years).

This is fairly surprising because the demand for personal finance software is relatively large. We will keep monitoring the home budgeting software market and update this page if any new substantial pieces of software are released.

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What Is The Best Personal Finance Software?: A comparison of the best personal finance software available

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