YNAB Personal Budget Software & Finance Forums

[supenguin]

I was just curious what everyone uses for software to track your investments? Stand-alone software for investment tracking? Excel spreadsheets? Pencil & paper? File cabinet full of account statements?

Currently I've got my employer's 401k, previous employer's 401k, and a bit of money in a RothIRA. I've been following the Dave Ramsey plan for a while, got my emergency fund almost fully funded & just about ready to start getting into investing. Up to this point, I've just been using YNAB 3 and updating my account balance at the end of the month. Once I start actually investing, I want some way to keep track of what I'm invested in, and if I've gained or lost as well as how much I've gained or lost.

Currently the only program I have that can do investment tracking is MoneyDance, but I haven't looked at it much. I used it as more of a Quicken replacement to track my spending in the pre-budget days. I'm open for suggestions for other programs to try out.

I am on a Mac, but I'm sure others on the forums would love to hear suggestions for Windows or maybe even Linux.

[virago317]

I use Mint.com. It's able to connect to all three of our retirement accounts (although it won't connect to all of our bank accounts), which are invested in stock index funds, and it keeps track of daily changes with a customizable chart (although not all the data is accurate for every day). So, not too great a solution, but free, reasonably reliable, and with good graphics.

[elizstock]

I too am looking for a good solution. I love the sleekness of YNAB and dread the thought of going back to Quicken. I've used mint.com a bit, but was hoping there might be a non-internet solution out there. I'd like something to track all of my investments easily, but I'd also like something that helps me balance my checkbook a bit easier. I know that a lot of YNAB users don't worry as much about traditional balancing, but I can't shake the habit. I'm afraid my wants will lead me back to Quicken, which is what forumites recommended the last time I asked this question. To those who use Quicken: how bloated is the new version of the software?

[Patzer]

I too am looking for a good solution. I love the sleekness of YNAB and dread the thought of going back to Quicken. I've used mint.com a bit, but was hoping there might be a non-internet solution out there. I'd like something to track all of my investments easily, but I'd also like something that helps me balance my checkbook a bit easier. I know that a lot of YNAB users don't worry as much about traditional balancing, but I can't shake the habit. I'm afraid my wants will lead me back to Quicken, which is what forumites recommended the last time I asked this question. To those who use Quicken: how bloated is the new version of the software?

I'm still using Quicken to track investments, and double-tracking my budget accounts so I can get true net worth numbers out of Quicken. I don't know how bloated the new version of Quicken is, because I quit upgrading with Q2006. I decided that the ability to download transactions wasn't worth enough to risk Intuit breaking more of the stuff I use that formerly worked. An unanticipated side benefit of not upgrading is that the marketing nag messages in Quicken pretty much quit happening a couple of months after Intuit sunset the downloads. And I can still download quotes from Yahoo and import them to Quicken.

As far as reconciling, I reconcile my checking accounts, credit cards, and cash account in both Quicken and YNAB. I only reconcile my savings accounts in YNAB, because the Quicken reconciliation wizard is overkill for how simple those are. It would be nice if YNAB included software support for 3-state uncleared/cleared/reconciled and a wizard for reconciliation, but I can replicate that functionality using flags to indicate reconciled and manually performing the rest of the wizard's function.

Patzer

[lautzu]

Check out:

http://investoscope.com/

Not perfect, but Mac native and not trying to be more than it is. Good luck.