Financial Planning Software Reviews

Financial experts agree that personal finance software can help you reduce “financial stress”. Financial planning helps you keep track of your expenses and income, plan wise money-saving strategies, gives you control over your money, peace of mind, and saves you time.

These budget software reviews provide information to help you decide which personal finance software is better for your needs.

Mvelopes – uses an envelope budget system where you save part of your income periodically (by-weekly or monthly) to pay future bills and stay within your budget. You create spending categories called “envelopes” which you set up for your various expenses. Mvelopes focuses more on budgeting your money than most other personal finance software programs.

Their application is website-based, so you don’t need to download any personal finance software on your computer. This allows you to share financial planning with another person, such as your spouse and this also causes less tech support problems. This envelope system includes features such as FREE online bill pay service, automatic monthly income allocation to your spending accounts, and links to more than 14 thousand financial institutions.

Summary - Mvelopes is particularly useful for people who travel frequently and want web access to their financial planning. Disadvantages: There is only one savings category, it has quarterly and yearly fees, and is more elaborate than other personal finance software systems, so it takes longer to learn.

You Need A Budget – By using their four sound financial principles, you’ll never find yourself in financial trouble. Their personal finance software is user-friendly and allows you to import information from your bank, set up repeating expenses, offers unlimited user-defined categories, charts, and other reports. A great advantage is their automation, so you don’t need to repeat data entry.

Setting up YNAB personal finance software is fast and easy and they offer great support such as online tutorials, a wiki, user forum, online user manual, a FAQ section, and FREE online coaching through webinars. After you set up your starting budget, you can easily import information from your banks, schedule payments and tasks, create charts, and other reports to organize your finances.

Summary: YNAB comes with 5 bonus spreadsheets, auto-suggest budgeting and The YNAB Way eBook FREE.  Disadvantages: Currently is not available for Macs, though you can run it on an emulator.

Quicken Deluxe – combines data from your bank account, investments, and monthly bills into a single database so you can better organize your financial planning. This personal finance software includes many solid tools to help you create your monthly budget, pay your debts, allocate regular savings, manage your investments and plan your retirement.

Their personal finance software is very good for tracking and analyzing your expenses and this is a big help at tax time. It provides you with comprehensive, searchable help topics even with no Internet connection. Quicken Deluxe offers access to most major banks so you can download your statements automatically online. You can set up automatic data downloads at a specific time each day; however you must close it to run scheduled updates.

Summary: Your impression of Quicken Deluxe personal finance software will depend on the compatibility between your bank (and other financial institutions) system, and Quicken’s data access. Disadvantages: It has reported software bugs, no portfolio analysis, expensive phone support, and doesn’t open during downloads