What are the best software tools for personal finance?
Mint.com—Easy solution to provide insight into finances. Pros: Cons: GnuCash—Great for the meticulous who want to know every detail of their finances. Pros: Cons: I like You Need A Budget (YNAB) Pros: Cons: Excel Pros: Cons: Intuit Quicken. Pros: Cons: I'm a big fan of buxfer.com I just switched (from the abandoned, but good MS Money) to Moneydance 2010 http://www.Mvelopes.com Mvelopes is envelope-style budgeting in an online application. I've tried all of the other applications and I choose to pay for this one for the following reasons: For Mac it's definitely iFinance. I use iBank for Mac to keep track of my expenses. I also use the iPhone version since they can sync over Wi-Fi and I can capture expenses right on the spot instead of trying to remember what I spent on when I turn on my laptop. KMyMoney Pros: Cons: For iPhone: iExpenseIt Money Manager Ex PROS: CONS Emergency Account Vault (Windows) I use it to store info about all of my accounts/assets in an encrypted document. It's more for keeping track of everything that is in your name than managing money. Good for situations when you need to quickly look up info about a specific account you own. For any android device you can try: Daily Expense Manager - to track your expenses and a host of other apps to suit your specific needs.
Did a little bit of digging, and found this article, from Staples High School in Westport, Connecticut.  Hopefully this will be a growing trend.  They say: A personal financial management class will now be offered at the beginning of the upcoming school year (2011-2012). According to the course catalogue, the focus of this course will be using mathematics as a tool in developing financial literacy skills. Topics covered in the course will include: earnings, banking, credit cards, loans, taxes, insurance, investing, loans, budgeting, and buying personal property. “In a perfect world, everyone would be required to take a personal finance course,” Principal John Dodig said. Google Finance will do all the bullet points in your list and a few more.  The only drawback is that you have to enter ALL buy and sell manually.  It has an import feature, but it does not work with all trading software. http://www.google.com/finance Let me know if it works.  Also, yahoo.com/finance has a good tool, but I still like better Google's application. Generally this gets corrected when you file returns for both States -- one owes you some refund, and younowe some money to the other. Multistate tax returns are their own special kettle of worms, so you might want to consider hiring a pro to straighten this out -- their software has some tools personal packages don't. Financial literacy for individuals is the instruction and comprehension of different money related issues. This subject concentrates on the capacity to manage personal finance matters in a productive way, and it incorporates the information of settling on suitable choices about individual finance, for example, insurance premiums, educational fees, real estate investments, tax planning, retirement saving, budget management and so on.   Let's have a look at the importance of Financial Literacy in an Individual's life so that it can become a source of inspiration for you.   Inspiration and financial literacy for individuals enable people to end up plainly independent with the goal that they can accomplish budgetary solidness. The individuals who comprehend the subject ought to have the capacity to answer a few inquiries concerning buys, for example, regardless of whether a thing is required, whether it is reasonable, and whether it a benefit or a risk.   Financial literacy for individuals shows the practices and states of mind a man has about cash that is connected to his everyday life. Financial literacy demonstrates how an individual settles on monetary choices. This attitude can enable a man to build up a money related guide to distinguish what he procures, what he spends and what he owes.   The absence of financial education can prompt owing a lot of obligation and settle on poor monetary choices. For instance, the preferences or drawbacks of settled and variable loan costs are ideas that are less demanding to comprehend and settle on educated choices about in the event that you have monetary proficiency abilities.   Monetary proficiency training ought to likewise incorporate hierarchical abilities, consumer rights, innovation and worldwide financial matters in light of the fact that the condition of the worldwide economy incredibly influences the U.S. Economy.  As per the saying of one of the renowned actor cum producer, Lucille Bell, 'Keeping busy and making optimism a way of life can restore your faith in yourself'. Yes, the current market trend has proved this inspirational quote to a true extent. Investing money into trading and financial market is a hard nut to crack and it requires a thought-provoking financial inspiration for individuals. To earn handsome money, you need to become smart enough to understand the market behavior, market flows and all the associated ups and downs. Now, you are confused. No, you don't need to hold an MBA degree or become a financial expert to learn lucrative investing skills. Wealth Generators is there for you to make you learn all the essentials techniques required to make your hard earned money provide you with the best output which you can never imagine. Yes, optimism and the smart skills are the two pivotal ways to get success over the curvature of the financial twisting.   We are considered to be one stop financial inspirations for individuals who wish to earn money by making smart investments. It all has become possible due to years of research and development of our financial veterans and their innovative attitude in developing financial tools. The amalgamation of the computer, communication technologies and our educational financial tools have lowered the risk of investments. With a commitment and optimistic approach, you can earn good money in no time, if you have proper market knowledge. Our experts have done extensive research and they are always updated with the latest insights of the trading and investment markets. We believe that your solid financial inspiration to save your expenses and turning them into handsome profits can make you a wealthy person. So, if you are really willing it, Wealth Generators is there for you, the ultimate source of your financial inspiration. So there are a lot of people that get into trouble in your type of self employment situation.  This is what I do, and I use google drive so there are no cost for tools.  However, having an accounting system is better. Getting in trouble with the IRS really sucks bad. "Yes.  The simplest option to track your spending over time is to familiarize yourself with the ""Reports"" menu on the toolbar.  Take a look specifically at the ""Reports > Income/Expense > Income Statement"" report, which will sum up your income and spending over a time frame (defaults to the current year). In each report that you run, there is an ""Options"" button at the top of the screen.  Open that and look on the ""General"" tab, you'll be able to set the time frame that the report displays (if you wanted to set it for the 2 week block since your last paycheck, for example).  Other features you're going to want to familiarize yourself with are the Expense charts & statements, the ""Cash Flow"" report, and the ""Budgeting"" interface (which is relatively new), although there is a bit of a learning curve to using this last feature. Most of the good ideas when it comes to tracking your spending are independent of the software you're using, but can be augmented with a good financial tracking program.  For example, in our household we have multiple credit cards which we pay in full every month.  We selected our cards on specific benefits that they provide, such as one card which has a rotating category for cash back at certain business types.  We keep that card set on restaurants and put all of our ""eating out"" expenses on that card.  We have other cards for groceries, gas, etc.  This makes it easy to see how much we've spent in a given category, and correlates well with the account structure in gnucash." "Note that mutual funds' quarterly/annual reports usually have this number. I generally just let my home-accounting software project my future net worth; its numbers agree well enough with those I've gotten from more ""professional"" sources such as monte-carlo modelling. (They'd agree better if I fed in all the details of my paycheck, but I don't feel like doing the work to keep that up to date.) I'm using Quicken, but I assume MS Money and other competitors have the same capability if you buy the appropriate version." "As your financial situation becomes more complex, it becomes increasingly more difficult to keep track of everything with a simple spreadsheet.  It is much easier to work with software that is specifically designed for personal finances. A good program will allow you to keep track of as many accounts as you want.  A great program will completely separate the different account balances (location of the money) from the budget category balances (purpose of the money).  Let me explain: When you set up the software, you will enter in all of your different bank accounts with their balances.  Perhaps you have three savings accounts and two checking accounts.  It doesn't matter.  When you are done entering those, the software will total them up, and the next job you have is assigning this money into different budget categories: your spending plan.  For example, you might put some of it into a grocery category, some into an entertainment category, some will be assigned to pay your next car insurance bill, and some will be an emergency fund.  (These categories are completely customizable, and your budget can be as broad or as detailed as you wish.)  When you deposit your paycheck, you assign that new income into budget categories as well.  It doesn't matter at this point which accounts your money are located in; the only thing that matters is that you own this money and you have access to it.  Now, you might want to use a certain account for a certain budget category, but you are not required to do so.  (For example, your grocery category money will probably be in your checking account, since you will be spending from it regularly.  Your emergency fund will hopefully be in an account that earns a little higher interest.) Once you take this approach, you might find you don't need as many bank accounts as you thought you did, because the software does the job of separating your money into different ""accounts"" for different purposes. I've written before about the different categories of personal finance software.  YNAB, Mvelopes, and EveryDollar are three examples of software that will take this approach of separating the concepts of the bank account and the budget category."