Personal Finance Software Reviews

MoneyWell is another personal finance software application built for the Mac.  It’s sleek, it’s shiny, and performs like you would expect any good piece of Mac OS software to.

MoneyWell uses the very effective envelope budgeting method (well, in this case, it’s a “bucket” budgeting method) to help you better manage your finances and plan for future expenses. Among other features, MoneyWell offers Direct Connect Banking and uses a single-window interface designed to simplify your experience with the MoneyWell software.

So how does MoneyWell stack up to the other Mac-based competitors such as iBank, Snowmint’s Budget, and others?  Hopefully this MoneyWell review and walkthrough will give you a better idea of what MoneyWell has to offer in terms of effective personal finance software.

*Note: This review is for version 1.4.12 of the MoneyWell software.

Who’s Behind MoneyWell?

MoneyWell is produced by No Thirst Software LLC, a small company built by entrepreneur Kevin Hoctor.  Kevin states that part of the mission of the company is to “deliver excellent products and services that change peoples lives.”  Not a bad mission statement if you ask me.  And if there’s any avenue in which peoples lives can be changed, it’s certainly in helping them better manage their money and debt.

I personally like that MoneyWell is produced by such a small company.  This usually means that customer service is personable and often quick.  Customer satisfaction is usually top priority in small companies such as No Thirst Software.  Also, the creator has a vested interest in the product, and as such, will be very focused on future improvements.

Installing MoneyWell

MoneyWell offers a free trial version of the software for you to test drive before you buy.  The only limitation of the trial is that you can only enter 200 transactions.  This should definitely be enough for you to see if you want to buy the software for good.

After clicking the Free Trial button on the MoneyWell website, you’re guided through the basic download and installation steps to easily install MoneyWell on your computer.

After installing MoneyWell you’re given a couple of options to get started:

I particularly like that they offer the option to import an OFX, QFX, or QIF file from another budgeting software application if you’ve been using one.  Also, the sample file is a good way to click around and learn the system a little bit before diving in with your own transactions.

Being that this review will try to give you a walkthrough-type view, I chose to start from scratch.

*Note:  The MoneWell website has a good collection of tutorial videos to help you with learning the ins and outs of MoneyWell and getting started with your own budget.  Be sure to check it out if you’re needing help.

Setting Up MoneyWell

When starting from scratch, you’re prestented with this screen:

Here you can see the overall look of the application (although it doesn’t yet have any data in it).  We’ll go over the single-screen design in more detail a little later.

Adding Buckets

While this is probably pretty self explanatory, here you will check each “bucket” that you want in your budget.  These buckets are the same as envelopes in other envelope-based budgeting software programs (you may want to consider these your “categories” of income and spending).

Throughout your budgeting, you will add money to (through income) and take money out of (through spending) these buckets.  You can change these later, but you should do your best to cover all of your expense categories here.

*While I didn’t see an option to create custom buckets in this step, I did see later on that you can add custom buckets by right clicking on a bucket (in the left sidebar of the appliation) and clicking New Bucket.  You can also click the “plus” icon beneath the bucket list.  I was glad to see this capability since any effective budget must allow you to customize it to your specific spending needs.

Adding Your Bank Accounts

After adding your buckets, you’re taken to a screen to add your bank accounts.  MoneyWell offers Direct Connect to your bank which allows you to automatically download your bank accounts as well as your transactions.  You can also choose to add your bank account manually if you choose to do so (or if you have difficulty connecting with your bank).

It wouldn’t let me connect with my bank (Chase).  After digging around a bit, I found that Chase charges $10/month to allow direct connect with personal finance software.  Looks like I’ll be adding my accounts and transactions mannually (which is fine with me — I actually think it helps reinforce the monitoring of your spending habits).

MoneyWell’s Single-Window Interface

MoneyWell does a pretty good job of introducing you to the single-window interface that it uses.  Here’s the screenshot that they provide on their website:

I see this as a total matter of personal preference.  Some will really like the single-window plan, while others may see it as a bit crowded for so much information.  I don’t think it’s crowded per se, but I could see the benefit of having a separate windows for transactions (allowing more space for more historical budget/spending information without having to click to each separate bucket).

Draw the Fill Line: Setting Up a Spending Plan

Once you’ve added your bank accounts to MoneyWell, you’re now ready to set up your Spending Plan (also known as a budget).  MoneyWell refers to this step as creating “fill to here” lines on your buckets.  Basically you are noting how much money you will need to spend during the month from each bucket.

You can create your Spending Plan by clicking on the Spending Plan button  at the top of the MoneyWell screen.  You’re presented with this screen:

If you’re just starting out with MoneyWell, you will enter in the “Planned” amount for each bucket.  You can set the Frequency and Timing for each bucket as well.  If you have a number of past transactions already in MoneyWell (if, for example, you imported a larger file from another personal finance software application), you can choose to calculate your spending plan by your past history.

Data entry into this Spending Plan was quite easy.  At first I was frustrated that I couldn’t tab through the fields to enter the numbers quickly.  But I soon found that by hitting Enter on the keyboard after each entry, it takes you down to the next bucket’s Planned field.  You can thank me later for saving you loads of time with that little tip.

Fill the Buckets: Allocating Income

Once you’ve set up your spending plan (told each bucket how much money you need in it) , you can now allocate the money that you have in your bank accounts to your buckets.  If you’d like to start by allocating the beginning balance of your bank accounts, you’ll first need to designate the Starting Balance “transaction” to be used for your Salary bucket.  One way to do this is to click on the transaction and then choosing Salary from the Bucket drop down list in the Transaction Detail section.  You’ll then see that your Salary bucket shows that amount next to it.

Now, you can mannually allocate money from your salary bucket into your expense buckets by clicking and holding on the Salary bucket and then dragging your mouse over an expense bucket and releasing.  In the box that appears, type in what you’d like to allocate, and click Add.

By clicking on the Allocate Income icon ( ), you are given this screen:

The numbers in the far right column show the amount to be allocated to the respective buckets.  These are determined by your spending plan settings (you’ll notice that the numbers are half of what the “planned” column shows.  This is because I have my income set to come twice a month (hence the buckets will be filled with half the planned amount, twice during the month).

You can change the allocated amount by double clicking in the cell and changing the number. You can also prioritize the expense from Lowest to Highest.  This will help with allocating your income and making sure that your most important expenses are always paid.
After allocating your income you will see the balances of each bucket in the left sidebar.  See the following screenshots:

Empty the Buckets: Adding Transactions

There are a number of different ways to add transactions in MoneyWell.  As already mentioned, you can use Direct Connect to automatically download transaction data.  If, for whatever reason, you don’t use Direct Connect, you can either upload an exported file from your bank or you can add each transaction mannually.  We’ll look at both.

Enter Transactions Mannually

Entering transactions mannually is fairly easy.  You can new transactions by clicking the Transaction icon ( ).  You can then tab through most of the important details in the Transaction Detail section (on the right side of the screen) and enter as you go.  I like that for most transactions you won’t need to use your mouse much while entering the data (unless you want to use the Status feature).

At first I was disapointed that you needed to use your mouse to click the transaction icon for each new transaction.  But then I happened to try hitting Command + N on the keyboard and it did just what I had hoped: it started a new transaction.  Trust me, this will save you loads of time if you’re entering all your transactions mannually.

Importing Transactions

If you’re looking for a quicker alternative for entering your transactions, you download your transactions from your bank and import them into MoneyWell.  The file needs to be either an OFX, QIF, or CSV file, so make sure your banks can export one of those file formats (most banks will).

After downloading the file from your bank’s website, simply click the Import icon ( ) and select the file.  After choosing a date format that will work with your file, click “Import” and your transactions should show up in your transaction history.

The one thing that you will need to do here is go through your imported transactions and specify which bucket each transaction is for.

Moving Money in MoneyWell

Moving Money Between Buckets

You’ll sometimes find that you’ve overspend in a certain category.  Since you’re using the envelope budgeting methodology, you’ll have to take money from another category to be used to cover the overspent amount.  Doing so in MoneyWell is fairly easy.   Just as you do when you alocate money from your Salary bucket to your expense buckets, you can just “drag and drop” money from one bucket and put it into the other.

For example, in the screenshots below I had overspent in my Gifts category by $56.63 (I had $30 in the bucket to spend, but I became too generous and spent $86.63).  To cover the overage, I decide that I can take money from my Vacation/Travel bucket.  By clicking the Vacation bucket and dragging it to the Gifts bucket, I can choose to add the $56.63 to make it even.  See the screenshots for a play by play of how that happens:

Moving Money Between Bank Accounts

When you transfer money between your bank accounts (for example, from your Checking to Savings), you’ll want to record that as a transaction.  Moving money between bank accounts, however, is just as easy as moving it between your buckets.

Using the same drag and drop technique that’s outlined above, simply drag money from your checking account onto your savings account.  Then simply fill out the amount you want transferred and click Add.  If you want the amount to be shown in a bucket (in this case, Savings), you may designate a bucket for that transaction.

Reconcile Bank Accounts

Another little feature that some may find handy is the help MoneyWell gives when reconciling your bank transactions.  It’s fairly self explanatory and easy to use, so I won’t say much here.  But here’s a screenshot in case you’re interested:

I’m not sure that we need a whole new reconciliation screen for this, but the visual aids will be helpful for some.  The only thing I would add in terms of account reconciliation is the ability to do it directly from the regular transactions screen by clicking the circle to the left of the transaction to mark it as cleared.

Reports

The Reports section in MoneyWell may not be what most people might expect.  What some other personal finance software programs call reports are actually graphical representations of their spending information.

Being that MoneyWell shows much of this graphical representation in the main screen (determined by what you have selected at any give time), MoneyWell doesn’t have a separate graphical analysis area.  MoneyWell’s Reports are basically a number of different data tables showing your spending information.  While these may useful to some, I personally prefer a larger set of graphs to choose from.

Granted I may not have enough data (or rather, data over time), to really appreciate the graphs that MoneyWell provides, I’ve found other applications to have better spending analysis capabilities via their various reports and graphs.

Other Notable Features

MoneyWell offers a number of other features that aren’t covered in detail in this review.  You can read more about them on their website, but I thought I’d mention a few here.

• Scheduled Transactions
• Search Bar
• “Memorized” Transactions
• Smart Buckets
• Copy to Excel or Numbers

MoneyWell Price

MoneyWell costs $49.99.  They offer a free trial (you can enter up to 200 transactions) so you can get a good feel for what it has to offer before buying it.  If you find that MoneyWell helps you manage your money better, $49.99 is a small price to pay.

Money Back Guarantee

If you purchase MoneyWell and then later decide that it’s not for your, you can get a full refund up to 60 days after purchase.  No questions asked.  This is a solid guarantee that I believe the company will stand behind.

Conclusion

MoneyWell uses the solid envelope budgeting methodology that has helped people get a handle on their finances for years.  The MoneyWell system utilizes this methodology well.  I would like to see a little more encouragement for the users to “budget to zero.”  Currently it’s a little too easy for users to leave a chunk of money unbudgeted in their Salary bucket.  So if you use MoneyWell, make sure to stay disciplined and get to as close to a zero-based budget as possible.

The MoneyWell software was clean and professionaly developed.  I found no bugs and only a couple of areas that I thought could have used some usability improvements.  Data entry was quite simple and fairly quick.  As far as the software goes, it felt very solid.  In terms of effectiveness, MoneyWell will get the job done with it’s budget “buckets.”  I was left wanting a little more in terms of reports and graphs, but those things aren’t the main features that most will look for in personal finance software.

All things considered, if you try MoneyWell and find that it works for you, go for it.  While I may still have other favorites above MoneyWell, it’s a solid budgeting tool that, if used correctly, will help you shed debt and increase your savings.

Budget, by Snowmint Crealive Solutions, is an envelope based budgeting software program that was originally built for the Mac, but that is now available for both Mac and Windows platforms.

Being that I’m a huge proponent of budgeting using the time-tested envelope method, I’ve been looking forward to checking out Snowmint’s Budget for a little while now.

In general, most personal finance software applications that use envelope budgeting will help you manage your spending better.  But the methodology is just part of it.  The software also needs to be well designed, easy to use, and effective.  How does Budget by Snowmint stack up to the competition?  Let’s find out.

Note: This is a review of one of the 6.2 versions of Budget (Mac). There have since been newer versions released (up to 6.5), which are sure to have some improvements and changes.

Who’s Behind Budget?

The company that created Budget is Snowmint Creative Solutions, LLC.  It looks to be a small operation, with two principles at the head (Ron Hooper and Kyle Hammond) and a few other contractors.  I personally see this as a positive thing.  A small team means centralized responsibility and usually means that they take more ownership in the product.  This is a good thing.

There are a few things that stick out to me about the Snowmint company.  For one, everything that I read (online and on Snowmint’s website) points to the fact that Snowmint provides very good customer service and product support.  If contacted, they strive to respond to your questions within 24 hours.  The FAQ section is large and comprehensive.  Also, their forums provide a great deal of answers and appear to be rather active (with new posts and comments being added regularly).

They also have a great guarantee, but more on that later.

Getting Started with Snowmint Budget

Before I get into the actual set up process with Budget, I’d like to point out that Snowmint provides a good deal of help to get you started with Budget.  On their Budget Information page, they offer numerous helps including instructional pdf files, a visual (and effective) tour of the envelope budgeting concept, a set up tour, and a usage tour.  All of these were very helpful.

Another one of my favorites was this:

They even have instructions and guidance on how to use Budget to teach your child or teenager to learn to better manage their finances.  This is something that all of our youth need to learn and I was glad to see that it’s something that Snowmint has thought through.

Setting Up Budget

For this review and walkthrough I’ll be using the Mac version of the software.  When you first download Budget (by clicking the Free to Try button at top right of the website), you’re first presented with a Setup Assistant.  On the Budget Information page Budget provides a pdf file to walk you through setting the program up (that doesn’t use the Setup Assistant) as well as a Setup Tour (that does use the Setup Assistant).  I chose to use the Setup Assistant.

Import

After the introduction, you’re given the option to import a QIF or OFX data file.  Unclear as to what this was talking about (it didn’t already want me to import my transactions did it?), I searched in the help.  It turns out that this step allows you to import data from a previous budgeting software program (for example, Snowmint’s Budget Workbook).  For most, you’ll just want to skip this first step.

Setup Bank Accounts

This step is as simple as it sounds.  Simply give your bank account a name, enter an account balance, and click Create.

Create Envelopes

This is, arguably, the most important step of creating your budget.  Here you’ll create all of the envelopes that you’ll spend money “out of.”  If you’ve used budgeting software that didn’t use envelopes previously, you can consider these envelopes to be your different spending categories.

For example, you would have an envelope for your mortgage, one for groceries, one for entertainment, etc.

Snowmint’s Budget has a long drop down list for you to choose the envelopes from.  Or (and this is important) they allow you to create your own envelopes by simply typing it in the box.  Too many finance apps don’t allow you to create your own custom categories — I’m glad that Snowmint has seen the light.  Also, as you type, Snowmint offers suggestions.  I found this to be faster than using the drop down list.

The more fully you complete this step, trying to think of all your envelopes, the more effective your budget will be.  You may want to have a record of your past spending on hand for this step.

Distribute Funds

In this section you distribute your initial bank account amounts into the envelopes.  This is easily performed by double-clicking on the envelope listing and entering the amount.  I found out after clicking around that you can also use only the keyboard to enter amounts by arrowing down or up to the envelope and hitting the Tab key to edit (this will save you a ton of time).  Naturally, the Amount to Distribute amount is lowered by each distribution that you make.

Budget Setup

Budget tells you here that if you only wish to use the program as an account manager, than you’re now complete with the setup.  If, however, you want to use Budget as a budgeting tool (I hope that all of you would say, Yes!), it has a few more steps for you.

Using this software only as an account manager and not taking advantage of the envelope budgeting system would be like buying a Porsche and never taking it over 35 mph.

Enter Income / Expenses

The Enter Income step is fairly self explanatory, you enter the amounts and frequency of each source of your income.  Budget offers a number of pay frequencies — nice.

When you enter your expenses, it has you enter your budgeted amount for each expense.  These amounts can be anything from weekly to yearly budgets.  You also define which paycheck (in my case, Husbands or Wife’s paycheck) will be used for which envelope.

Setup Complete

There’s a friendly end screen once you’re done with the Setup Assistant.  It reminds you that your complete satisfaction is important to them and gives you their contact email.  It mentions that they try to respond to your email within 24 hours. A nice, reassuring touch.

Snowmint Budget Main Window

After the inital setup you’re then presented with the main window of Snowmint’s Budget:

The main window of Budget basically consists of four areas: the top toolbar, the left sidebar, the main envelope area, and the bottom “expansion” bar.  We’ll briefly go over each:

The Top Toolbar

Contains buttons that perform actions such as entering transactions, deposits, etc.  You’ll use this toolbar to see a transation history on a bank account basis or an envelope basis.  Also found are buttons for stats and an Info button that is used to view or change information for your envelopes or bank accounts.

The toolbar has a fairly intuitive interface.  Depending on what item you have selected, it dims or brightens icons that would be clickable for that item.  For example, if I’ve clicked on a bank account, it allows me to click on the Debit icon (brightened), but not on the Envelope History icon (dimmed).

Left Sidebar

The left sidebar contains your bank accounts and their balances.  By clicking on the individual bank acounts, you are shown the envelope balances that pertain to that bank account.

Also, with a bank acount seleced, you can click the Info button  to edit information on that account such as its name, preferences, next check #, a signature, etc.

By double clicking on an account, you open the Balance window to reconcile your bank accounts.

Envelope Area

All of your envelopes are found in the largest section of the screen.  I like that this clearly puts the emphasis on the balances in your envelopes, rather that simply what you have in your bank account (a reminder that each dollar spent must be accounted for with funds from an pre-planned envelope balance).

Each envelope shows the envelope name as well as the balance of funds in that envelope.  These envelopes are also a little more customizable (more on that later).

By clicking an envelope once, you can see the icons in the top toolbar brighten, allowing you to click on them.  This means that you can enter spending transactions (a check, debit, or credit card charge), record a deposit into that envelope, see the envelope transaction history and stats, and more.

Bottom Bar

The bar at the bottom the screen, while it doesn’t take up much space, can actually do quite a bit.

The leftmost icon opens the Envelope Display View.  This allows you to view envelopes in a customized way.  For example, I could create a Fixed Expense view to see all the envelopes that I consider fixed expenses.

To set up a custom envelope display view, simply right click in the Envelope Display window and then click New Envelope View.  Then click the Settings icon and choose your view preferences.

The Settings icon opens up a settings screen in which you customize the Envelope Display Views that you set up.  Among many other settings, this is where you determine which envelopes will show up in which view.

The Transactions icon opens a sidebar on the right side of the screen that contains transaction information.

The History icon opens a bottom window that shows transaction history for whichever account or envelope you choose.

The Stats icon adds some stats to the history view.

See the following screenshots to see each of these functions:

Customizing Envelopes

If you think the plain gray envelopes are a little bland, you’re right.  But the good news is you can customize them to a certain degree.

By clicking on an envelope and then clicking the Info icon in the top toolbar, the info window for that envelope opens up.  This window provides some good information such as the amount budgeted for the envelope, which pay that budgeted amount is coming from, and more.

If you click on the Appearance button, you can change the color of the envelope, as well as add a black and white or color icon to it.  With a couple of clicks, I turned my boring gray envelope into this:

After a few minutes, I was able to turn my envelopes into a little more colorful collection:

*If you wanted, you could color code your envelopes to help you visualize your spending.  For example, all fixed expenses could be lighter hughes of yellows, all your variable regular expenses in hughes of blue, and all your discretionary expenses (that you can control more), in darker hughes of reds.  Just a thought for those who see things more visually.

Here’s some screenshots of the envelope customization process:

Depositing (Adding Funds) into Budget

There are a few of different ways to go about recording your income or paycheck into Snowmint’s Budget.

Into an Envelope

If for example, you get some money that you want to only go into a certain envelope you can click that envelope and then click the Deposit icon .  Fill in the deposit information and click Record and you’ll see your bank account balance and the envelope balance increase by the amount of the transaction.

Manually

In most instances, however, you will be getting a larger paycheck and need to distribute that income into various different envelopes.  If this is the case, you click on the bank account (in the left sidebar) that it is to be deposited into and then click the Deposit icon.  In the Deposit window you input where the income is coming from, how much it is, and then distribute the income into the various envelopes as shown:

Using Pre-allocated Settings

If, however, you set up a budget (income and expenses) in the Setup Assistant when you began, you have another, much quicker option to record your income and distribute it to the envelopes.

Simply click on the Record Pay icon , select which pay source it is, and click either Record Pay now (to use the set allocations) or Adjust Pay Allocations (to make changes.  Your income is automatically put into the different envelopes for you according to the allocation that you set.

Adding Transactions

There are three basic ways to record transactions.  If the transaction covers only one envelope, the best way to do it is to click on an envelope and then one of the transaction icon (check, debit, or charge) and enter the transaction information (you can also just double click the envelope to open the transaction window).

If the transaction is going to be split across multiple enveloes, you click on a bank account and then click one of the transaction icons.  If you go this route, you’ll also need to set the amounts for each envelope.

You can also choose to use the Transaction Entry window to enter transactions.  As noted before, if you click the Transactions icon at the bottom of the screen, the Transactions Entry window opens.

What I Don’t Like About the Data Entry

It may be a personal preference, but I found that entering transactions into the system was a little too tedious.  The way it’s set up, while simple, requires you to make many clicks of the mouse.  I was longing for a list of sorts for the transactions so that I could just use my keyboard to enter multiple transactions very quickly.  Instead, I was clicking around to different envelopes for each transaction.  On weeks with a lot of transactions, this may get a little annoying.

Import Transactions

Thankfully, you can import your transactions from your bank.  This should save you loads of time.  I couldn’t get it to work with my .QIF file, but that may have been a problem with my institutions downloaded file and not with Snowmint Budget.

Transferring Funds

There will be times when you will need to take money from one envelope to pay for something from another envelope.  This is good in that it reinforces the idea that everything you spend, must be accounted for.

Transferring funds from one account to another is quite simple in >Budget.  All you have to do is click an envelope (that you want to take money out of) and drag your mouse to whichever envelope you want to transfer money into.  In this screenshot I was transferring money from my Restaurant envelope into the Groceries envelope:

I also noticed that when I tried to enter a transaction that would take my envelope balance negative, I got the following:

A nice touch.

A Few Other Neat Features

Stats

One of the icons in the top toolbar is the Stats icon:  It allows you to view various financial data in table, line graph, or bar graph formats. While this is a nice feature, a broader offering of reports would be nice.

Balance

Another Budget feature that may come in handy (especially if you still use monthly bank statements) is the Balance:

This is primarily used to reconcile your bank statements (or online transaction history) with your Budget software.  It’s fairly intuitive and easy to use.

…and More

This is not a complete list of all the features that Budget has to offer.  The documentation for the software goes over a number of others for the more advanced user.

Snowmint Budget Price

The listed price for Budget is $39.95 for a downloaded copy.  At the time of this writing, it was “on sale” at $29.95.  In terms of quality personal finance software this is a very reasonable price — even a little lower than most competitors.  If you want a physical CD, the price is $47.95.

Snowmint’s Free Trial

I’d also like to highlight that Snowmint offers a free trial for Budget.  It’s a great way to try the software out before you buy.  They have a fantastic money back guarantee, but if you want to take it for a test drive before handing over any dough, you can.  The trial allows 250 transactions and 4 balances, so depending on your rate of transactions, it could last up to 4 months.

To download Budget for free and start using the free trial, go to their catalog page, and then click the “TRY” button.

Snowmint’s Guarantee

Another good thing about Snowmint Budget is it’s great guarantee.  In their words: “If you are not 100% satisfied with any of our products for any reason within 60 days of your purchase we will give you a full refund.“  I would think 60 days of consistent use would be plenty of time for you to see if you like the product or not.

They also guarantee great support and privacy.  Be sure to check out their guarantee page to get an idea of how much they stand behind their product.

Conclusion

Budget by Snowmint is a solid personal finance software program that the Mac lovers out there may find to be a useful tool when trying to get a better handle on their spending. It’s also now available for Windows, so the PC users can also benefit.  I don’t believe that I ran across a single bug in the time that I spent in the application, something that hasn’t happened with the other Mac software applications that I’ve reviewed.

I really like that Budget uses the time-tested envelope budgeting methodology.  For those that are dedicated to using this software, it will definitely have a dramatic effect on your money management skills.  It’s hard to not manage your money better when you’re using the envelope method.

Is Snowmint’s Budget the best budget software out there? No.  Is it a strong contender (especially in the Mac environment)? Yes.  I had few complaints about Budget.  Primary among them was that the transaction entry could be designed to be a bit faster.  The reports could also use some work.  But all things considered, if you’re a Mac user and are looking for another alternative to help you manage your money, Budget by Snowmint is one that you should at least take for spin using the free trial.

Try Snowmint

MySpendingPlan^TM is a free, online personal finance software application that promises to help you “Plan Better,” “Save More,” and “Live Smart.” Certainly we could all do with little more of each of these.

So how does MySpendingPlan^TM stand up to the other online personal finance packages that offer their services (some for free as well)?  This review will walk you through the online budgeting system to help you get a better feel for what MySpendingPlan^TM has to offer.

My Experience with MySpendingPlan

The MySpendingPlan.com website is very clean and professional. Something I certianly hope will carry over into the software. The home page gives you some great insights in to how MySpendingPlan^TM can help you accomplish your goals to plan better, save more, and live smarter.

If you’d like, you may want to take a tour of the program by clicking Take a Tour at the top of the screen. While the ‘tour’ doesn’t really show you much of the actual software, it does help you to get a feel for MySpendingPlan^TM by highlighting a number of of it’s features.

Setting up MySpendingPlan

Signing up for a free account if fairly painless. A quick click on the Free Sign Up link and you’re on your way. After entering in a few pieces of personal information (not yet sure why they require a zip code, but they do), you’re told that a welcome email will be sent to your shortly.

The email, by the way, ended up in my junk box so you may want to check there and add it to your safe list. Aside from a Sign in link, the email didn’t provide much besides a few special offers that they want you to check out.

You can start immediately however, by clicking on the Go to My Account link at the bottom. Before going to your account, however, you’re given this screen:

I’m not even into the actual program yet and I’m already seeing advertisements (this particular one wants me to connect me to a realtor to sell my house). While I expected some ads and/or recommendations (they do, after all, have to make some money somehow to provide the service), the fact that it was so soon and so intrusive surprised me a bit.

Hopefully this is something that won’t be too intrusive in the future. They have a large green button titled Get Started, but don’t get confused. That is the button to continue with their ad’s service. The button to continue with your MySpendingPlan^TM account is at the bottom in much smaller letters.

Create a New Spending Plan

When creating a new spending plan you can name it and choose the ‘template.’ Your two options are Home Finances and Life Events. I chose Home Finances since I will be setting up a personal budget rather than planning for a specific event.

This screen also has it’s fair share of ads, both in link and image format: I’m getting the impression that this program might be fairly ad heavy.

To complete the setup of your new spending plan, you’ll go through 7 different steps: Intro, Interview, Accounts, Income Sources, Envelopes & Groups, Bills, Envelope Budgeting, and Assign Money.

Interview

The first question in the “Interview” asks you when was the last time that you reviewed your insurance needs. Ah, here come the opportunities for them to upsell you to services.

Interestingly enough, the second question asked about checking accounts. After entering that I already have a checking account, it suggests that open a free checking account with Washington Mutual.

For those that don’t know, Washington Mutual no longer exists — it was bought by JP Morgan Chase Bank almost a whole year ago. While not a big deal, this doesn’t exactly instil much confidence in MySpendingPlan^TM.

Other questions that it asked were focused on saving acounts, mortgages, selling or buying a home, etc.

Accounts

The Accounts sections is pretty straight forward.  In a pretty intuitive way, you simply add the bank accounts that you have.

For those who don’t like to have third parties know their financial information (like bank account numbers), you’ll be glad to know that MySpendingPlan^TM doesn’t ask for them.

Income Sources

In the same manner as before, you’ll then enter all the sources of your family’s income.

You must enter the date of the next paycheck, a title, the amount, and then choose the frequency that that paycheck will be coming in (monthly, weekly, etc.). You are also able to add notes if you desire to do so.

Groups & Envelopes

The next setup step is to create all of your spending groups and envelopes. Groups are major categories of spending (e.g. Food) and Envelopes are more specific categories of spending within the Groups (e.g. Groceries).

I actually like this section quite a bit. It allows you to create your own custom envelopes that work best for you. This is a key part to any effective budgeting software — the ability to create and manage spending categories that are tailored to your personal spending habits.

MySpendingPlan^TM offers a good number of existing groups and envelopes for you to work with (which you can edit), but you can also add your own by clicking New Group or New Envelope at the bottom of the screen if needed.

I received an error (see the screenshots below) when adding a new envelope that said I had to have a budget amount for the envelope. I had assumed that the assigning of budget amounts would be in a later step since it didn’t require me to set a budget amount when I was editing the other envelopes. Perhaps a small glich?

A Note About Speed – When you click just about anything within MySpendingPlan^TM there is about a 2 to 4 second delay before the action is completed. During the delay you see this icon: . I grew to hate that icon.This delay became very painful as I was editing only a few different envelopes. It was slow enough, that I even checked my internet connection to see if I didn’t have a good connection (but the connection was strong).

I don’t know if this delay is going to be standard for every click or if it is only apparent during these setup steps, but if it continues it will be a HUGE let down and probably enough for me to never use the program.

*Update: I noticed throughout the application that not all clicks had such a long delay (but most of them did). The drop down boxes, for example, had no delay at all.

Bills

Here you can enter all of your “fixed” bills or expenses that you know that you’ll have each month, week, etc.

While this step is certainly easy and intuitive within the software, I personally found it a bit tedious after a while. Part of this was due to the delay between clicks and the completion of the action (about 2 seconds).

Hopefully, however, this is something that will save a good amount of time once it’s set up properly.

Envelope Budgeting

In this section you set your monthly budget for all your different envelopes or spending categories.

*A Note about Envelope Budgeting – This is certianly something that MySpendingPlan^TM has done right. The time-tested budgeting method knows and envelope budgeting is probably the most effective way to manage your finances. The act of putting certain amounts of money into different envelopes (with either physical money or tracking it electronically) and then spending out of those “envelopes” encourages you to 1. plan your budget well and then 2. hold yourself responsible for all spending that occurs. I’ve found that this action alone has the greatest affect on personal spending and the way we manage our finances.

MySpendingPlan^TM allows you to enter your budget amounts in two different ways: manually or with their Auto-Assign feature. If you choose to do it manually, you simply type in your budget amounts on the right side of the screen. You can tab between entries, BUT you still have to wait through the “refresh” delay (about 2 to 3 seconds) before moving on the next one. I tried to tab through them quickly while editing the amounts, but once the refresh was over, it changed all the newly edited numbers back to what they were before. This was extremely annoying.

You can avoid this headache by deleting the envelopes you know you wont use. But either way, you’re spending time waiting for the “refresh” delay while deleting envelopes or when entering your budget amounts.

I also chose to try out the Auto-Assign feature. My results were less than stellar, although this may be partly my fault. In the envelope setup section, I didn’t delete all of the envelopes that I don’t use. Had I only included envelopes that I use, the Auto budget may have worked out a bit better. As it stands, it budgeted either $1, $60, or $100 for almost every category (except for Bills since I already set an amount for those).

I don’t, for example, think I need to budget $100 each month on Shoes, but only $60 each month of Auto Fuel. Basically you’re going to need to go over each envelope and set individual amounts anyway.

This is not a bad thing since it wouldn’t really be your budget if you didn’t set it anyway right? The Auto-Assign feature might work better in future months (if it goes off of your past spending habits), but I don’t see why you would use it to start out with.

MySpendingPlan^TM does encourage you to use a zero-based budget (allocating each dollar of your income to expense). This is a very effective way to budget, forcing you to have plan for each dollar that comes into and out of your pocket.

Assign Money

The seventh and final step is to assign the funds from your income to the budgets that you just set for the month.

MySpendingPlan^TM explains that the figures you enter in this step will be remembered for a “funding template” that can be used in the future to fund the envelopes more quickly and easily.

Just as before, you can choose to enter the numbers manually or by using the Auto-Assign Money button. The entering of the data in the section, however, is MUCH easier and quicker than in the envelope budgeting section. Here you can tab through the boxes and enter the data without any delay at all.

I again tried the Auto-Assign feature. I found that the system did auto-assign some allocations for certain paychecks correctly, but other’s didn’t make much sense. For example, it said I should use $100 from our first paycheck of the month to pay for my electricity bill (good because it’s due on the 10th). But it also said that I shouldn’t use any money from my first paycheck for groceries for the month (bad because we need to eat food to survive the first 15 days of the month).

I also noticed that when changing the numbers around, the ‘remaining’ number didn’t change accordingly (probably just a small bug).

Fund the Envelopes

After the initial setup steps, you are asked to fund your envelopes.

Again, you can do it manually or have MySpendingPlan^TM do it for you using the ‘funding templates’ that you just set up.

A Small Bug – When I tried to have them Auto-Fund the envelopes, I got the following two errors on different pages. When I tried to select which template to use:

I then went back a page and got this error when I clicked the Auto-Fund button for the second time:

I should note that MySpendingPlan^TM is still in Beta, so some errors and bugs like these are to be somewhat expected. After clicking Transactions > Fund Envelopes at the top, I was then able to successfully fund the envelopes.

A Overview of MySpendingPlan.com

The main view in MySpendingPlan^TM is something called My Big Picture.  At the top, you have icons for other areas including My Big Picture, Setup Wizard, Envelopes, Accounts, Income Sources, Bills, Tasks, Shopping Lists, Savings Goals, and Reports.

The Setup Wizard, Income Sources, and Bills are essentially the same as when we used them set them up so we wont go over those.  We will, however, briefly go over each of the others to give you an overall view of what MySpendingPlan^TM has to offer.

My Big Picture

My Big Picture, as the name suggests is a dashboard of sorts that displays all your information in one place.  Here’s a screenshot:

Here you can see your envelope balances and your spending for each.  You can also see your bank account balances, upcoming bills, tasks in progress, savings goals, news, a chart (I got an error instead of a chart), and of course, a Save More box (their opportunity to make money through ads) along with a couple other items.

I like that you can edit what shows up to a certain degree.  I thought I read somewhere that you can move these boxes around, but I couldn’t get it to work.  You can, however, minimize or close boxes that you don’t want showing up.  They don’t allow you, however, to close the Save More box.  Not a big surprise.

In general, I’m not too impressed with what I’m seeing here. It provides a couple good pieces of information (mostly your spending), but you really can’t do much from this screen.

Accounts

The Accounts area lets you actually edit your accounts and transactions.  By hovering over an account, you can choose to edit your account or view, edit, or create transactions.  Since this is where you’ll spend a good chunk of your time, let’s take a look at it:

Not much to look at yet, but we’ll change that.  It looks like you can change the date range to view as well as how many transactions to show on a page (a nice feature).

What I wasn’t too impressed with, however, was the Kontera add that was embedded in the page.  You know those sites that have those (in my opinion) really annoying advertisement links that pop up as you scroll over them?  It looks like MySpendingPlan^TM is using them as a source of income:

If an ad for “Account Balance” information isn’t helpful, I don’t know what is.  (I hope you can sense my sarcasm.)

Adding Trasactions

Adding and editing transactions in MySpendingPlan^TM is very simple.  But again, just because it’s easy to do, doesn’t mean that it’s effective or efficient. On average, each transaction took me about 30 seconds to enter in.  And that was only entering in the minimum requirements (date, payee, amount and envelope).  That information should be able to be entered in about 5 seconds (at least it’s that way with many other effective personal finance software applications).

It takes longer to add a transactions for two main reasons: 1. more clicks than necessary are required to complete a transactions entry and 2. there’s the now all-to-familiar delay between clicks and completion of the action.  For example, here’s a compilation of different screenshots  (of the “delay circle”) that I took while entering only 1 transaction:

I hope that I’m making my point clear.  Editing transactions in MySpendingPlan^TM is simply to tedious and time consuming.

Envelopes

While this is fairly self explanatory, I thought I’d cover it anyway.  The Envelopes area shows your envelopes with their corresponding Budgets, Payments, Deposits, and Balances.  You also have a little bar graph that, I assume, fills up as you spend through the month (although I’ve entered a few transactions for this month and don’t see anything).

Tasks

Next is the Task Planner.  Not much to mention here either, other than it could help you keep track of your tasks if you put them into the system.  While this isn’t a groundbreaking feature, it’s a nice one to have.

Shopping Lists

…is Coming Soon!  I’ll be sure to update this section when MySpendingPlan^TM has it up and running.

Savings Goals

This is one area that I like.  It allows you to set specific savings goals and tracks your progress towards it.  For example, I put in mine that I want to have $10,000 saved up in my House Down Payment envelope by December 15th.  There’s a Spending Ticker (bar graph) that shows your progress.

Savings goals in this sections should also show up in the My Big Picture area as well.

Reports

The Reports area of MySpendingPlan^TM has two main categories for it’s reports:  Income and Spending Reports and Bills and Tasks Reports.  There are a total of 10 different reports.

Here’s some screenshots of the reports.

I couldn’t get the view to change at all, despite my efforts at changing the Change Zoom settings.  As such I had to scroll to see much/any data.  Again, something I’m sure they’ll fix before getting out of Beta (or maybe it just doesn’t like Firefox as a browser).   Also, the reports come in either Report (table) form, a pie graph, or a bar graph.  The bar graphs look like basic Excel-produced graphs.

In short, the Reports section left much to be desired.

MySpendingPlan Price

The main thing that MySpendingPlan^TM has going for it is the price.  MySpendingPlan^TM is completely free.

MySpendingPlan Ads

After reading this review and seeing all the screenshots, you may not feel that the MySpendingPlan^TM ads is that big of deal (and it may not be).  But I should point out that the screenshots throughout this review didn’t include any of the ads.  For that reason I thought it prudent to show you the influence that the advertisements will have when using MySpendingPlan^TM.

Here’s a screenshot of a typical page:

The areas in red are advertisement areas (the area on the right is often a picture or motion ad as well).  This may, or may not bother you.  There were also some other areas containing ads:

• A Save More area at the top of the My Big Picture page.
• The “interview” when you first setup (this is nothing more than an opportunity to refer you to different services).
• The large advertisement for connecting to Realtor when you first signed up.
• The Kontera ads in the text (I only saw this once, so I don’t know how much they’ll use it).

Now, I’m not saying that MySpendingPlan^TM shouldn’t offer these advertisements.  If it weren’t for revenue that they made off of these ads, they wouldn’t be able to provide the software for free.

But I personally think that MySpendingPlan^TM is too ad heavy for the functionality that you’re getting.  It almost seems as though they’ve focused more on getting the ads in front of you than on creating a truly effective and quick solution to help you manage your finances better.

Conclusion

MySpendingPlan^TM offers their online personal finance software for free — but it comes with a price: time and a lot of advertisements.

While the budgeting methodology that MySpendingPlan^TM uses (the envelope-based budget), the overall offering of MySpendingPlan^TM is inferior to many other solutions on the market.  The main complaint I had about MySpendingPlan^TM is the fact that almost every action took considerably longer than it should have.  This longer time is a result of a nasty delay after the click of the mouse (in many instances) and the fact that the way you enter data (transactions for example) is simply takes too many clicks of the mouse to perform.  In short, the user interface needs quite a bit of improvements in order for it to be quick and effective.

The thought did enter my mind a couple times, however, that considering that their revenue comes from advertisments that you see while using the program, it could be possible that they don’t necessarily want you to do your work quickly.  The longer you spend in their program, the more face time their advertisments get.  Just a thought.

As mentioned above, MySpendingPlan^TM offers a good deal of ads — too many for my tasts.  And while, for the most part, they weren’t overly intrusive, I got the feeling that MySpendingPlan^TM was first an ad generator and second a personal finance tool to help you budget better and more effectively.

They’re still in Beta, so I’m sure many improvements are yet to be made.  I look forward to seeing some of those improvements.  But for now, I’d recommend looking elsewhere.  I see no reason to recommend MySpendingPlan^TM over other free services, especially with the latest improvements that Mint’s made (custom categories, better budget, better graphs, unintrustive ads, etc.)