…Microsoft Money that is.
(Image from Flickr user stuartpilbrow)
I have tried just about everything for managing finances. Mint, Yodlee, Wesabe, Quicken Online, Quicken installed on my computer, MoneyDance…and I’m sure a host of other personal finance managers. And I keep coming back to Microsoft Money. Which, much to my chagrin, has been discontinued.
You see, I have a long love affair with Microsoft Money and used it for years, in part because somehow it was on my computer I didn’t have to pay for it. I’m sure some kind manufacturer placed it there and who knows what happened for it to be activated. I truly am not sure. Nevertheless, I became comfortable with it, though I wasn’t above switching (hence the fact that I tried all of those other potential solutions).
In the end, what keeps bringing me back is the ability to chart a cash flow forecast. Not just a spreadsheet of sorts with a bunch of numbers but a graph of the money flowing in and out of my account. The line on the graph goes higher, I have more money. Thel ine goes lower, approaches zero, I can see that I might overdraw an account 3 months down the road because of some irregular expense. NONE of the other potential solutions match this feature in MS Money. In fact, none of them even come CLOSE to the functionality offered by MS in this regard. Which makes me sad because it seems like such an intuitive thing to include.
(image from Amazon’s product page: see the nice graph in the lower left corner showing the cash flow for the next few months?)
(image from Microsoft Money Help & Information Pages)
And yes, I realize that the other options offer other forms of functionality that MS Money doesn’t (namely, the online syncing that actually works with my bank account, credit cards, etc.) I actually have kept my account at Yodlee for this very reason – they sync with EVERYTHING. EVERY.SINGLE.ONE of my financial accounts can be linked in Yodlee, which is a feat in and of itself, but it also makes it convenient to get the data I need to put in MS Money (which I hunted down a couple of months ago on an auction site to grab the last version since stores had already nixed it).
So, MS Money – something I will hold onto until I absolutely can’t anymore (or until a solution comes along that matches this one particular feature that is a deal-breaker for me). I will keep a computer with Windows XP or Vista on it, if necessary just to maintain my access to the cash flow forecast that MS Money provides.
Organizing things that have a permanent home isn’t that difficult. Assign a space and be disciplined about returning the item. What about transient, outgoing items like library books, loaners from friends, and so on? Create a station for them.
