Thursday, May 1, 2008

Personal Finance Software

I have been looking into ways to get off my desktop bound personal finance management software for the past few weeks. Ideally, i want to access my information from any computer or any OS i am on.

Of course, i value the privacy of my information and when I start talking about money, even more so. If a "bad" person got a hold of my financial accounts things would be bad to say the least....a hassle i would prefer to avoid.

I found a couple of online sites: http://www.mint.com/ and http://www.buxfer.com/ that on the surface look really cool. However, both have left me wanting. Perhaps i am just stuck in the old way of doing things.

To me, i want to take a receipt from a credit card purchase enter it into a form and then balance it when i get my monthly statement. This allows me to see exactly what I am being charged and by whom. If something is on my statement but i did not enter it, i can deal with it.

Mint basically tells you when a charge has been made on your account. Basically the reverse of how I do things today. At first I did not like the idea at all, but as I have thought more about it, I am rethinking it. Still not too sure.

Buxfer is confusing to me. It aspires to function how M$ Money or Quicken work, however the interface is not intuitive at all. How do i enter a loan? Just put a negative number? How does it deal with interest payments? how do i know how much principal i have paid? The only conclusion i have come up with is it is in need of a lot of work.

So....i have been thinking of rolling my own Personal Financial software, open source of course. If i did that, i could do exactly what i want. However, that means i would have to host it somewhere and figure out how to calculate loan interest, etc... I think i know how i could host it for free, however how private would my data really be?

I need to think this through...

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