Free online personal budgeting and financial planning software

Posted on October 30, 2007 at 2:53 pm

I’ve been using Quicken to manage my personal finances and budgets for over a year now and have been pretty happy. Note “pretty”, but not completely. As a personal financial management software, Quicken does a good job of pulling in data from multiple accounts and generating pretty reports on spending, etc. However, it doesn’t support some of my financial institutions and it only runs on my laptop.

Mint.com, a very cool web-based financial planning software that’s completely free, is super quick to setup and brings you all of the power of Quicken to the web! Mint.com has some pretty nice features:

1. Keep your finances in one place – Just like Quicken, you can see all of your bank and credit card transactions in one place. Another cool thing about Mint is that you can label your transactions so you know which bills to split with friends, which bills need to be reimbursed, etc.

2. Keep tabs on your financial health – Quickly access information such as your total cash, total debt, and current net worth.

3. Support for many banks – Mint.com supports over 3,000 US banks and credit card companies. Once it’s added, Mint keeps is balanced and up-to-date. Unlike Quicken where you have to manually click Update, Mint does this for you.

4. Know where your money goes – Transactions are automatically categorized so you’ll know how much you’re spending on gas, food, rent, and more. You can break reports down by category, merchant, etc.

5. Setup up alerts on any account – Another nice thing you can setup on Mint are alerts for low balances in any bank accounts, credit card due dates, high charges on credit cards, bank fees, etc.

Of course, the most asked question about this kind of service is how secure is your data going to be. That’s obviously a good question and whether you sign up for Mint or not really will depend not on what security practices they have in place, but on how risk averse you are.

You can read the Mint security policies here, however, if you simply don’t trust your data online, then you probably don’t want to use a service like this. For someone like me, I probably will use it since I’m pretty sure that most things will eventually move online and the security will have to be top-notch.

The disadvantages to Mint are the fact that it does not support brokerage accounts, which Quicken does and it does not support bank transfers, which Quicken does not support either. Other than that, however, it’s a great way to get an instant snapshot of your basic spending habits and to get some idea of your personal finances.

You can also check out another site called Buxfer, which is a free online personal financial management tool.

Anyone use this software yet? Post a comment and let us know! Enjoy!

[tags]finance software, personal finance, personal budget software, personal accounting software, financial planning software, money management software, personal financial management, personal planning software[/tags]

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Comments

6 Responses to “Free online personal budgeting and financial planning software”

Matsonian said on : November 2nd, 2007 at 8:45 pm

Wow… I had no idea about this site. Thank you for bringing it up. It is exactly what I need. By the way, if you are planner like I am, check out QuickPlanner Plus (quickplannerplus.com) it is a great planning software that helps you whether you planning a business or planning a party.

Harei Edom said on : March 11th, 2008 at 2:08 pm

There is a new website that anyone can use free of charge to maintain secure, full featured, personal budgeting online. It is at:

myexp.org/OOTD_gate.php

Rhys said on : June 6th, 2008 at 5:45 am

If you’re not keen on having to log on to an online budgeting site, I have created a website that allows people to download a fully automated Excel based budget planner to their computer to use over and over again, whenever they like.

If you’re interested, go to easy-budgeting.com and check it out.

Nick said on : November 9th, 2008 at 10:44 pm

If you’re looking for an online budgeting application that doesn’t connect to your bank accounts, you should try Budgetoo. Budgetoo gives you the control of a spreadsheet, but without the boring work. It’s completely free: budgetoo.com

Buxfer - Free personal finance software to track your expenses Says:

[...] is an online financial management and budgeting software that I liked, but had a few features missing which made me end up not using it. However, there are [...]
February 12th, 2008 at 6:41 am
Geezeo - Free online money management software Says:

[...] of features you’re looking for. I’ve written about several before including Mint.com, a free online personal budgeting software, and Buxfer, another free personal finance [...]
October 1st, 2008 at 5:22 am