Personal Finance & Budget Software

I have been testing various programs for personal finance. I started with Quicken in 1994 because it was in the software package included with my 1st PC. Then I switched to Microsoft Money 95. I preferred MS Money, but there really was not much difference. At that point, I only used the software to keep my checkbook register. Neither Money 95 not my bank offered online services at that time, so I entered everything manually. After online banking became available, my son bought me an updated version of Money & I connected my accounts. I still used Money basically as a checkbook register & added the savings & credit cards. It was nice to have the download & not have to enter everything manually. I upgraded to Money 2004, which came with a new computer purchase, and continued to use Money up until Microsoft decided to discontinue it in 2010.

I switched back to Quicken (2010 Starter Edition) and I had problems with it. The automatic downloads did not always work. The initial download from my bank set up my credit card, but then would not download transactions to in after the initial download. When I tried to manually download the transactions, Quicken tried to set up a new account - would not let me download it to the existing account.

I gave up & went back to MS Money. Now I can continue to use MS Money as long as I want without support & without online services. Microsoft offered all Money users a "sunset" version for free. I can download transactions manually, and even financial institutions that no longer provide downloads for MS Money (AKA Discover), provide download to a QIF file, which MS Money supports.

I have been looking for alternatives to Quicken, should there come a day when I can no longer use MS Money. Preferably free. If I am going to pay, I would buy Quicken Deluxe, and hopefully find resolutions to the problems I experienced with the Starter version.

Mint.com - comes from Intuit - makers of Quicken. It is free & it works very well. Works better than Quicken 2010 Starter did for me. Mint has become an essential part of my personal finance plan. Mint is an online service, and some people might not be comfortable with keeping their financial information in the cloud.

Ace Money Light - The light version is free, but it only allows you to add 2 accounts. It is a good program for a beginner to learn to work with personal finance software. The full version costs less than Quicken.

Grisbi - Free. I liked it at first, but then I could not enter a split transaction.

GnuCash - is more business oriented, but can be used for personal financed. It is free, but I found it complicated. Double entry is not for beginners.

KMyMoney - Free. Also uses double entry, but less complicated than GnuCash.

Replacing Hard Drive

The hard drive errors came back - CHKDSK ran without me asking it to, then boot failure. I removed the HD & connected it as a USB storage device on my laptop, but I cannot access the files. Says disk not formatted. I had moved everything but my pictures.

I got a new 1 TB hard drive at Best Buy & restored the Dell computer from the back-up. The restore was successful, but I ran into a problem with HDD size. The old hard drive was 150 GB & the new HD was 1 TB - only the 150 GB was accessible. I followed the directions but was unable to increase the size of the partition. Problem solved - there was an extra unused partition that I had to delete. Dell E-510 restored with 1 TB hard drive. I can try to reformat the old HDD, but I think it is toast.

Hard drive failure is not fun, but it was a challenge solving this problem.

My Dell E-510 PC that I bought in 2006 had a major crash this morning.  I had run Windows 7 back up to external hard drive yesterday. This morning, it froze and would not reboot.  First, Windows prompted me to do system repair, then system restore.  Then I tried to restart normally - would not start. I reconnected the external drive, and got out the Windows Restore CD - not sure if it rebooted from the CD or from the hard drive, but it finally did complete the start up.  Running very slow.  I don't plan to replace it, but I think I need to get the files moved to the laptop.  I have the back up files, but not sure how I would access them if the PC completely fails.