What are some good, easy to use personal finance software? [UK]
Update: I am now using another app called toshl and I am very satisfied with it. In fact, I am a paying customer. It is web based, but it has clients for iPhone, Android and Windows Phone as well.  Another one, I tried is YNAB.   Did you consider trying an online app? I am using Wesabe and I am happy with it. I found it much better these web-based ones because I can access my data from anywhere. "I'm a big fan of Mint. I tried Wesabe prior to mint and at the time (about a year ago) it was lacking the integration of many of my accounts, so I had to go with Mint by necessity. Since then, Mint has gotten better almost monthly. I can do almost everything I want, and the budgeting tools (which would address your ""6 months out"" forecast desires) and deal alerts (basically tells you if you can get a better interest rate on savings/credit card/etc) are really helpful. Highly recommended!" Money Dashboard and Love Money look like two best options out there now that Kublax closed their doors. Mint were making noises last year about spreading to UK/Canada, but I've not heard anything new about that. CashBase has a web app, an iPhone app and an Android app, all sync'ed up. It doesn't integrate with banks automatically, but you can import bank statements as CSV. Disclaimer: I'm CashBase's founder. +1 for YNAB. I used to use MS Money until it was decommissioned. I used that to historically record my spending and investing, and plot my net worth. Whilst YNAB will do that, it is actually geared towards forward planning much more so. In this area, it is fantastic. I like that there are mobile apps for it too. My Finances is a personal finance app for iPhone and iPad. The app uses iCloud to sync the data between your devices if you want to. Otherwise the data is only local and won't be synced to any server. Spoiler: I'm the developer and my opinion may be biased.
You don't understand government financing at all.  Gov'ts earn revenue, aka, taxes.  They also spend money.  The different between the money they spend and they money they earn is the deficit.  If you run a deficit for a long period of time, you incur a very large national debt.  Now, you can finance (aka, pay for) a deficit by borrowing money.  This means you can sell bonds, and instead of pay off the debt each year, you just pay the interest.  If your spending balloons out of control, your the likely hood of you paying your debt decreases.  If you are very unlikely to payback your debt, people won't buy any more of your bonds, and you no longer have the income (from borrowing) to pay off your interest from other debt you owe, or what ever other obligations you own (think mortgage payments, or teachers salaries, etc).  Here's were Europe and USA differ: European nations can't just print money.  They can issue more debt, but they can't just create more euros.  IF you can print money, you can pay off your debt with money you literally created out of thin air (at the expense of your people, this is called inflation).  But this is a form of cheating, eventually people won't trust you, and won't buy your debt either.  So where do the banks come in?  if the government is SOUND and the banks are NOT, the government can backstop the banks.  This is what the US and UK did.  Greece, Spain, Ireland all had to back stop their banks also.  However, Greece, Spain, and Irelany ( and Italy, and Portugal) also have   1)  A lot of debt  2)  Structurally high deficits  3)  Extremely high borrowing costs (high interest rates...because people don't trust them...because...)  4)  Weak underlying economies  The fourth point gets you in real trouble.  if you have high entitlements, lots of poeple out of work, who the hell is paying taxes and what are they going to?  You have no revenue!  Remember, a govt works just like a household.  It is easy for a good household to support one member, but it is difficult for a member to support an irresponsible household. "Even though this is really a psychology question, I'll try to give you an answer. You do nothing but stay away.  What's going on is too small to matter. Bernie Madoff took investor's money and scammed them for $15B. That's B, billion, 9 zeros (Yes, I realize the UK Billion has 12, these are US Billion). Harry Markopolos was on to him, and presented his evidence to the government, but ""No one would listen."" In quotes because that's the title of the book he published on his experience. Even Barron's had an article suggesting that Madoff's returns were impossible. Eventually, it came to light. In my own experience, there was a mortgage acceleration product called ""Money Merge Account."" It claimed to help you pay off your mortgage in a fraction of the time ""with no change to your budget."" For two years or so, I was obsessed with exposing this scam, and wrote articles, nearly every week discussing every aspect of this product. Funny how even though mortgages are math that's pretty easy to explain, few sellers wanted to talk about the math. Using the same logic that you don't need to understand how a car works as long as you know how to drive. There were some people that would write to tell me I saved them the $3500 cost of that product, but mostly I argued with sellers who dismissed every word I wrote as if the math were incomprehensible to anyone but the software guys who wrote it. In the end, I had compiled a PDF with over 60 pages of my writing on the topic, and decided to call it quits. The product was recycled and now is sold as ""Worth Unlimited,"" but the software is the same.  This is all a tangent to your problem. It simply offers the fact that the big scam, Bernie, continued for a long time, and people who were otherwise intelligent, fell for his promises, and didn't want to believe otherwise. The mortgage software had many bloggers writing. Searching on the web found a lot of discussion, very easy to find.  People will believe what they wish. Tell an Atheist that God exists, or a believer that He doesn't, and your words will fall on deaf ears. Unfortunately, this is no different." voip voice Hello dear, i have good quality Mobile  dialer. Just install dialer software and give login and password then make call.,We have Nine Canadian &amp; UK dialer with highest voice. you can use all dialer in same account. if you like good quality service, please contact with us. Looking for Reseller. 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The above is true until 2015, when the rules become more relaxed - you will not need a VAT number from customers outside the UK in order to exempt yourself from collecting VAT. Turns out you need to be part of the MOSS scheme (more here) which was set up to prevent you having to register for VAT in every country you sell your software. Unless you only sell through app stores, and then it's easier because each sale is treated as you selling your software to the store for it to be sold on. You can reclaim all VAT on your eligible purchases in the UK, just as any other UK VAT registered business would (usual rules apply). And of course you don't collect VAT from anyone outside the EU, so you can either reduce the price of your software or pocket the additional 20%. I personally use mint.com and find the alerting feature to be handy.  The reports and ledger are nice for a web page and attractive, but I use Quicken for really keeping track of my money and budget.  Mint.com just doesn't offer the depth I want; but a lack of depth is a feature for some people. The one thing I do is to check my accounts online every couple of days (not just via mint's interface).  I am still protected from fraud if someone steals my money regardless of the vector of attack.  So mint's fault or not, I have to keep on top of my outgoing and incoming transactions with frequency so I can stop problems before they get too deep. summary:  the security is important, but being secure or not doesn't absolve me of being aware of all the transactions on my account.  I will still be protected by consumer laws (as much protection as that is) but I can't expect mint to fix any problems it might cause. MoneyDance Is the way to go.  I've been using it for years and it works well.  It keeps getting better, and best of all, it's completely cross platform!  Mac, Windows and linux! I was going to comment above, but I must have 50 reputation to comment. This is a question that vexes me, and I've given it some thought in the past. Morningstar is a good choice for simple, well-organized financial histories.   It has more info available for free than some may realize.  Enter the ticker symbol, and then click either the Financials or the Key Ratios tab, and you will get 5-10 years of some key financial stats.  (A premium subscription is $185 per year, which is not too outrageous.) The American Association of Individual Investors (AAII) provides some good histories, and a screener, for a $29 annual fee. Zacks allows you to chart a metric like EPS going back a long ways, and so you can then click the chart in order to get the specific number.  That is certainly easier than sorting through financial reports from the SEC.  (A message just popped up to say that I'm not allowed to provide more than 2 links, so my contribution to this topic will end here.  You can do a search to find the Zacks website.  I love StackExchange and usually consult it for coding advice.  It just happens to be an odd coincidence that this is my first answer.  I might even have added that aside in a comment, but again, I can't comment as of yet.) It's problem, however, that the universe of free financial information is a graveyard of good resources that no longer exist.  It seems that eventually everyone who provides this information wants to cash in on it.  littleadv, above, says that someone should be paid to organize all this information. However, think that some basic financial information, organized like normal data (and, hey, this is not rocket science, but Excel 101) should be readily available for free.  Maybe this is a project that needs to happen.  With a mission statement of not selling people out later on. The closest thing out there may be Quandl (can't link; do a search), which provides a lot of charts for free, and provides a beautiful and flexible API.  But its core US fundamental data, provided by Sharadar, costs $150 per quarter.  So, not even a basic EPS chart is available there for free. With all of the power that corporations have over our society, I think they could be tabulating this information for us, rather than providing it to us in a data-dumb format that is the equivalent of printing a SQL database as a PDF!  A company that is worth hundreds of billions on the stock market, and it can't be bothered to provide us with a basic Excel chart that summarizes its own historical earnings?  Or, with all that the government does to try to help us understand all of these investments, they cannot simply tabulate some basic financial information for us? This stuff matters a great deal to our lives, and I think that much of it could and should be available, for free, to all of us, rather than mainly to financial professionals and those creating glossy annual reports. So, I disagree that yet another entity needs to be making money off providing the BASIC transparency about something as simple as historical earnings. Thank you for indulging that tangent.  I know that SE prides itself on focused answers.  A wonderful resource that I greatly appreciate. Just buy a FTSE-100 tracker. It's cheap and easy, and will hedge you pretty well, as the FTSE-100 is dominated by big mining and oil companies who do most of their business in currencies other than sterling.