 When you think about it, money is really just information. Dollars are digital symbols of what you've earned, inherited, and tucked away for a rainy day. And with the ubiquity of online banking and investing, it's no wonder that ordinary people are turning to financial software to manage their personal finance information.
Naturally, there's Microsoft Money and Quicken from Intuit Inc., which you can buy to help track your assets and expenses. Still, these do-everything products don't always do everything. And for some, they simply do too much. Which brings us to the abundance of other applications—software that you can try, and in some cases, use for free.
We scanned the Internet to come up with applications that answer some of those nagging financial questions, such as: What happens if I pay $50 more per month on my mortgage? Is it better to buy or lease? Is there a simple way to track my portfolio automatically, without getting a migraine? There is no sense in asking hypothetical questions unless you get with it and find a way to start calculating some answers.
 Debt Analyzer 97.
Debt, a gremlin that sets up residence in our financial households, is often exceedingly difficult to banish once the critter makes a nest. Although eliminating debt is never easy, Debt Analyzer 97 from Insight Software Solutions sure helps.
Rather than go through a lengthy questionnaire like some debt-reduction applications do, Debt Analyzer has you fill in the blanks for each debt you have. You simply click the Add button to set up loan information, such as Name Of Debt, Minimum Payment, Current Payment, Balance, and Interest Rate. Then after you've configured your debt information for a credit card, mortgage, or another type of loan, Debt Analyzer reviews your situation and based upon one of three built-in approaches, it automatically advises you about the best way to get out of the red.
All you need to do is choose the method that fits your situation from the Reduction Plan drop-down menu. For example, Timed Debt Elimination creates a plan for being debt-free within a specified time frame. Another approach, Debt Reduction Schedule, computes a schedule that keeps your creditors happy, while still accelerating payoffs. Then there's Loan Consolidation, which shows you how to manage debt by consolidating several obligations into one loan with a lower interest rate.
In addition, Debt Analyzer creates a series of reports that show you how your plan works, as well as when and how much you need to pay toward your loans to become debt-free. Just click the Report button and Debt Analyzer does the rest. We entered some sample numbers to see what Debt Analyzer was willing to tackle. We set up a credit card balance of about $1,300, with regular payments of $27 per month (rate of 20.73%), a $753 per month home mortgage (rate of 7.75%), and a $20,000 home equity loan (rate of 8.50%) that had monthly payments of less than $250.
We chose Debt Reduction Schedule, entered $200 as the additional amount we could apply toward the loans each month (you can also enter a monthly budget and let Debt Analyzer figure this out for you), and then asked the application to create a plan. Debt Analyzer created a schedule that cleared the high-interest Visa debt first, then the home equity loan, and finally the mortgage, saving us over $22,000 in interest and reducing the payback time on the home equity and mortgage loans by five years.
If debt is your problem, Debt Analyzer is for you. It can change your financial life.
Debt Analyzer 97
free evaluation, $28 registration
(801) 295-1890
http://www.debtanalyzer.com
info@wintools.com
Easy Money.
Easy Money from WaverlyStreet Software does two things: it tracks where your money comes from and where it goes. The application doesn't offer long-term plans because it lacks checkbook functions. However, Easy Money offers a simple way to track bad spending habits so that you can change them. Tracking where your money goes is usually one of the first things financial planners ask their clients to do.
To get started with Easy Money, you'll need to set up categories for expenses and income. After that, all activities are merely click-and-enter functions. For example, enter a transaction by clicking the New Item icon. This reveals a dialog box where you can enter the amount of the transaction, its related category, and if you want to save it as an Expense or Income item. Expense items appear in red and in the transaction register, and Income items appear in black.
To create a cash flow report based on categories and dates you specify, click the Reports button. To get an instant display regarding the number of transactions you've made to date in a category and the monetary amount of each transaction, just select a specific category from the main screen.
Easy Money is a fair application if you just need to get a handle on where your money is going. However, there are other financial applications, such as Just Checking, that are just as easy to use and offer a lot more features.
Easy Money
free evaluation, $15.00 registration
(614) 447-1600
http://www.waverlystreet.com
dgjess@infinet.com
Expen$eIT.
Obviously, as the developers of this program, AppMagic has experienced the trials and tribulations of sharing living quarters with other roommates. Expen$eIT, which is still in its beta (prerelease) version, focuses on keeping track of shared expenses and who owns what. For example, let's say Jill and Susan share an apartment. When Jill buys groceries for a week and Susan pays the utility bills for a month, each roommate simply enters the date, the expense they paid, and the monetary amount into Expen$eIT. The program can then keep track of who paid what and fairly designate which roommate owes the other for shared expenses.
You can further organize responsibility for payment by selecting a category, such as Split Equally, or set up a custom category that does an uneven split among the participants. There's even an Owned By option—just to make sure everyone doesn't forget who bought the stereo, for example. A dialog box maintains a listing of who owes whom and how much. And to balance payments at the end of the month, just click the Pay Up icon, and ask those who owe money to pull out their checkbooks and start writing.
Expen$eIT
free evaluation (still in beta stage)
http://www.expenseit.com
TechSupport@AppMagic.com
Just Checking is a worthwhile program with an organized and user-friendly interface that makes using it a breeze. |
Just Checking.
Here's an application that handles your checkbook register—deposits and withdrawals—and categorizes your income and expenses. We like the uncluttered graphical interface and the ease of setup. Click the + icon to add a transaction, specify whether it's a deposit or withdrawal, and then enter the date, check number, payee, and amount. All transactions appear in your check register, which looks similar to the register in your paper checkbook. A mark in the last column indicates that a given check has cleared. And generating an expense summary by payee is as simple as a mouse click.
In addition to its clean interface, we also like Just Checking's ability to import QIF (Quicken) files, which is especially useful now that many banks are moving toward Web-based bill payment. In this manner, you can do your transactions through your Web browser. But in order to get them into your personal financial application, you have to download and import a file, often a QIF file. Just Checking, from developer Brent Shelton, is a great choice, then, if a checking account is the only account that you're handling online. If you need check printing capabilities, however, you may want to spill out some dollars for Quicken or Microsoft Money, because Just Checking doesn't print checks.
Just Checking
free evaluation, $12 registration
(800) 903-4152 (via the ShareIt! order service)
http://pages.prodigy.net/bdshelton
bdshelton@prodigy.net
Lease Calculator Plus.
Perhaps you have your debt under control and are looking for at program that can analyze the facts and figures for financing a large purchase. Or maybe you want to compare rates from a variety of sources. How about comparing the cost of leasing a car to buying one? Lease Calculator Plus handles these and other loan-related calculations.
Pine Grove Software also offers the Loan Calculator Plus program, but we opted for Lease Calculator Plus because it has all of the functions of Loan Calculator Plus, in addition to a special Lease vs. Buy advisor. This advisory function contains all of the lease jargon, such as discount rate, cost of capital, and marginal tax rates. There's even a provision for designating how much you'll use your purchase (or lease) for business purposes.
As you enter the data into Lease Calculator Plus, a wizard takes you from one section to the next. In the end, the application gives you a lease scenario and a buy scenario, providing a far superior way to make your final decision than banking on the advice of your friendly car salesman.
The Lease Calculator Plus application contains a couple of other useful advisors. There is a Loan Points Comparison Advisor, which can tell you if a mortgage loan with more points and a lower interest rate is going to cost you more than a loan with a higher rate and fewer points. The other useful tool is the Refinance Advisor; it tells you whether it would be a good idea to refinance or stick with the loan you have.
In addition to the advisory functions, Lease Calculator Plus also offers six separate calculators, each available by clicking the appropriate icon in the control bar. Included are Loan Calculator, Compound And Simple Interest Calculator, Remaining Balance Calculator, Accelerated Payment Calculator, Balloon Payment Calculator, Affordable House Calculator, and Amortization Schedule Calculator.
Lease Calculator Plus is one of the simplest and best applications we've seen for crunching numbers on loans and leases.
Lease Calculator Plus
free evaluation, $24.95 registration
(800) 242-9192
(609) 730-1430
http://www.pine-grove.com
sales@pine-grove.com
Personal Stock Monitor Gold.
If you invest and trade through an online broker, there might be enough tools on your broker's Web site to maintain all of the information you need. Companies like E*TRADE (http://www.etrade.com), Ameritrade (http://www.ameritrade.com), Charles Schwab (http://www.eschwab.com), DLJ direct (http://www.dljdirect.com), and now even big guys like Merrill Lynch (http://www.ml.com), are all putting their brokerage facilities at your fingertips, via your PC and the Web. Plus, you can also track your portfolio on public sites, such as http://www.quicken.com. However, for those of you who prefer to have your investment information stowed on your own PC, you may want to check out the Personal Stock Monitor Gold program from DTLink Software.
If you just need the basics, such as keeping track of your portfolio and updating your stock prices over the Internet, Personal Stock Monitor Gold is an excellent solution. Enter the ticker symbol of the stock, the date you purchased it, and for how much, and this handy application diligently keeps track of your stock records. You can also use it to illustrate asset allocations and create intra-day and end-of-day graphs on your portfolio's performance.
If you leave the application running while you're connected to the Internet, Personal Stock Monitor Gold will automatically update the prices of your investments at predetermined intervals, such as every 15 minutes. You can choose the stock quote source you prefer from a drop-down list. In addition, you can choose a Ticker Bar to place a moving, self-updating ticker of your stocks at the top of your PC screen.
Personal Stock Monitor Gold
free evaluation, $49.95 registration
(301) 441-3103
http://www.dtlink.com
info@dtlink.com
Rebate Tracker.
Have you ever bought a computer gadget and then swore that you were saving money because you were going to send in for the $50 rebate? Like many of us, your intentions were good but somehow the receipt disappears or the paperwork gets "lost" in the mail. Rebate Tracker from WorldStart helps alleviate these problems by organizing your rebates into a database, using fields for rebate items, company contact information, and the amount of the rebate. There's even a print utility for printing an envelope to send in a rebate based upon the data you've entered.
Tracking rebates is even easier. There are two tabs, one for Outstanding rebates and one for Paid rebates. Once you've received your rebate, a mouse click transfers it to the Paid section.
Rebate Tracker is well-designed and easy to use, and for those who keep missing out on the rebate method of saving a few bucks, it's well worth the $8.95 investment for registering this financial freebie.
Rebate Tracker
free evaluation, $8.95 registration
(888) 557-2558
http://www.worldstart.com/software.htm
steve@worldstart.com
StockVue 99 from AlphaCONNECT uses intelligent agents to gather information about your stocks. |
StockVue 99.
StockVue 99 from AlphaCONNECT is a more aggressive application for managing your investments. Based on the investments you place in your portfolio, this application grabs data from different Internet sources and organizes it behind 10 index tabs. Instead of navigating through several Web pages to find the data yourself, just click the appropriate tab to see the information that StockVue's intelligent agents have gathered on your behalf.
We especially like Market Highlights, which provides a business summary of the companies you've invested in, ratios and statistics of each stock in your portfolio, and links to more information about the stock. You'll find other valuable information about your stocks from the Research tab, such as buy/hold/sell recommendations from Wall Street analysts, courtesy of Zacks Investment Research.
Investors who like to keep their portfolios close at hand will like the Palm Pilot linking feature. And if you just have to have access to changing market conditions no matter where you are, you can have StockVue 99 send the information you specify to your pager.
Another one of StockVue's very slick features is the ability to send stock data to a Microsoft Word document, Excel spreadsheet, or Quicken; just click the embedded Word, Excel, or Quicken application icon on StockVue's button bar. StockVue 99 links up with the designated application, and the transfer occurs quickly and automatically.
At this point, StockVue 99 is freeware, so the ad banners you will see appearing at the top of the page as you use it are to be expected. But this software is so smart, we can't imagine that it will stay free for long.
StockVue 99
free evaluation, free registration
(888) 785-3370
(714) 957-8500
http://www.alphaconnect.com
support@alphaconnect.com
Digitize Data Into Dollars.
Now that you know the benefits and shortcomings of this crop of free software, try out some for yourself and pick your favorite. The Internet is full of financial freebies that you can download and try. Just type financial software into your favorite search engine and see what displays on-screen. Or check out the shareware and freeware titles available from http:// www.winfiles.com. The best freebie of all might be Microsoft Money (http://www .microsoft.com/money). You can download and use it for 90 days without spending a penny.
Stop wandering aimlessly through your finances each month, always asking questions but never finding the answers. Use one of these applications and start digitizing your financial data into dollar signs. 
by Jim Cope
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When you think about it, money is really just information. Dollars are digital symbols of what you've earned, inherited, and tucked away for a rainy day. And with the ubiquity of online banking and investing, it's no wonder that ordinary people are turning to financial software to manage their personal finance information. 
