Archive for the 'Tools & Calculators' Category
Monday, November 13th, 2006
More than a month ago, I wrote a post about tracking your spending for a month. I tried to think of the best way to budget, but I don’t think there is anything that works for everyone.
Everyone knows about MS Money and Quicken, so instead I’ve decided to compile a resource of free budgeting tools so that people can try them out on their own. Try a few. Get some ideas. Make your own. The important thing is to find something that works for you.
Here they are in no particular order:
- Quicken Online - Recently became free of charge. Tracks your spending and categorizes it automatically.
- SimpleD - An “open source Windows application designed for personal or household financial management.” The screenshots actually look pretty slick.
- AceMoney Lite - Freeware version of an offline personal finance management program. It even downloads stock quotes from the internet. Thanks Ken.
- PearBudget - An Excel spreadsheet that has definitely had a lot of time put into it. It’s a bit busy, but I still like it.
- Microsoft Office Accounting Express 2007 - Seems targeted at business, so this may be overkill for home budgets. But amazingly it’s free!
- Yodlee MoneyCenter - Initially just an account aggregator, Yodlee now offers spending categories which can be used to help you budget. (Why I use Yodlee for account aggregation.)
- Mint.com - Based on Yodlee back-end, with different features.
- Stackbacks - The “Stackbacks Automated Budget System” is more of a budgeting setup guide than a tool, but hey, download the .pdf and read away.
- Buddi - An open-source personal finance and budgeting program, which will run on any machine with Java installed. Thanks Gerard.
- Budget On Web - Also more biz-oriented, it is a “free online system that integrates project management with contacts management and financial tools.” Free up to 5mb of storage, that is. But that sounds like plenty for personal needs.
- Mo.neytrack.in - A “free online webapp that allows you to track all your expenses and income.”
- Grisbi - Another offline open-source personal finance app.
- MySpendingPlan - A free online budgeting software system that works on the ?”envelope” system. (Somewhat dated overview here.)
- PHPFIN - An open-source personal finance management program. It seems like you have to install it on your own server?
- GnuCash - “Personal and small-business financial-accounting software, freely licensed under the GNU GPL and available for GNU/Linux, *BSD, Solaris and Mac OS X.” Does OFX and QIF imports.
- Budget Master - A free personal budgeting program that offers charts and visual reports.
I haven’t had the chance to look through all of these, but if you go to SourceForge and search for “budget”, you get a variety of programs. Some look interesting and some haven’t been updated in a while.
Unnamed “Homegrown” Spreadsheets
Some of these I have on my computer, but I can’t remember where I got them from. Either it was downloaded somewhere where it was openly available, or someone e-mailed it to me and said it was okay to distribute. I do not take credit for any of them.
- Spreadsheet #1 - Very simple budgeting spreadsheet. Nothing fancy.
- Spreadsheet #2 - by a Neil Rothman - A bit more advanced with pull down menus and better layout.
- Spreadsheet #3 - Not sure who made this, but according to the file properties it was by “Anne, Edward & Frank Robinson”.
- Spreadsheet #4 - Another simplistic spreadsheet, author unknown.
- Spreadsheet #5 - Submitted by user Tony B. Instructions on use are included.
- Within Your Means - Via LeisureGuy, it looks like pretty polished.
This list is will be updated as I find more. If I missed anything or you have your own spreadsheet to share, leave a comment or shoot me a message with it attached.
Posted in Budgeting, Tools & Calculators | 54 Comments »
Tuesday, November 7th, 2006
As predicted in October, the new inflation portion of I-Bonds is 3.12% and the new fixed rate is 1.4%, for a total of 4.52%. This is still lower than what is available via Treasury Bills and online savings accounts, so those of us with older Savings Bonds should really think about cashing them in. But when is the best time to do it? Here how I try to figure it out, and a quick calculator that does it for you.
Should you redeem?
But first, let’s make sure you want to redeem. I-Bonds have several tax-advantages:
- Interest is exempt from state and local income taxes (although so is T-Bill/T-Bond interest)
- Interest can be tax-free for certain educational expenses
- You can choose when to pay taxes on it with cash basis reporting (and thus possibly delay until when you are in a lower tax bracket)
Read the rest of this entry…
Posted in Savings Bonds, Tools & Calculators | 17 Comments »
Sunday, October 22nd, 2006
Thinking about moving your cash to a higher interest rate? There are a lot of banks paying 5% interest or more out there. Many are online, but some might already be in your neighborhood.
Next, use this handy calculator to find out how much more money you’ll be looking at:
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Posted in Banking, Tools & Calculators | 37 Comments »
Thursday, October 19th, 2006
It’s open enrollment season again, which means it’s time to decide on your benefits and spending account contributions. PayCheckCity has a variety of tools for simulating what your take-home pay would be if you added disability insurance, increased your FSA amount, and so on.
It can also be a good time to check your paystubs and see if you want to make any other changes. Maybe you want to increase your cashflow, or see if you can afford to put more away in your 401k. You can also check if you’ve already paid as much taxes so far this year as you did last year. If so, you could underwithold taxes on purpose and stick the difference in an interest-bearing account to make a few extra bucks. You can then wait until April 15th to pay up what you owe without penalty. Uncle Sam makes millions every year on people who overwithold their taxes - why not flip the tables? Hint: If you want to stop withholding as much, you can put up to 10 allowances on your W-4 without IRS notification. You can put as many allowances as you want, but I wouldn’t go totally nuts.
Thanks to Mapgirl’s Fiscal Challenge for the PayCheckCity link.
Posted in Taxes, Tools & Calculators | 10 Comments »
Saturday, September 9th, 2006
What do you get when you combine the real estate listings on Craigslist and cross-reference them on Google Maps? HousingMaps.com. Only for major metro areas, but it’s still a neat tool.
Craigslist seems to have much more extensive listings for rentals than houses for sale, but more and more real estate agents are putting some of their listings to join the For Sale By Owner crowd. A friend of mine just bought a FSBO house off of Craigslist, and I’m told he got a good deal. Mostly it’s just another way to waste time browsing properties I can’t afford, but who knows, you may get lucky too.
Posted in Real Estate, Tools & Calculators | 3 Comments »
Thursday, August 3rd, 2006
As I’ve mentioned before, I use Yodlee, an account aggregation service, to track all my numerous accounts on a daily basis. You give them all the logins and passwords of your individual financial accounts, and it logs into all the sites for you. In the end you have a real-time view of all your balances and recent transactions, all neatly on one page.
Of course, many people are rightfully afraid that this leads to one point of access. If somehow Yodlee is hacked, they get all your information instead of just that of one bank. This is true, but I look at it a little differently because I have a lot of accounts.
Read the rest of this entry…
Posted in Tools & Calculators | 51 Comments »
Tuesday, May 9th, 2006
In my previous post on Calculating and Comparing Treasury Bill Returns, it was pointed out that my APY calculation was incorrect because the way T-Bills work, you can’t actually reinvest all the interest into the next T-Bill. That is true, but what you can do is set your T-Bill to fund and deposit via another interest-bearing account like ING Direct, Emigrant Direct, or HSBC Direct. This way, you can still invest in consecutive 28-day T-Bills, and anything not rolled over to the next T-Bill is still earning decent interest.
But, we still want to compare APYs! So, what was needed was a calculator that would take all this into account. So here it is:
Read the rest of this entry…
Posted in Tools & Calculators, Treasury Bills and Bonds | 16 Comments »
Monday, May 8th, 2006
These days you usually get APY (annual percentage yield) from banks, but there are some times when you want the APR (annual percentage rate), which does not take into the compounding of interest as it is earned. For some reason I could not find an APY to APR calculator online, so… I made one myself. Here are the definitions that the calculator is based on:
APR = PeriodicRate x Periods in a Year
APY = (1 + PeriodicRate)^(Periods in a Year) - 1
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Posted in Banking, Tools & Calculators | 20 Comments »
Monday, January 23rd, 2006
Update: I made a new and improved version of this calculator.
Using the rate-chasing breakeven time formula posted previously, here is the easy-to-use JavaScript Calculator version to help you decide whether you should move your money and chase the higher rate.
Note that it uses APR. Only know APY? Then please see my APY to APR calculator first. If that’s too much trouble, note that if you use APYs for both rates your final answer will be very close anyways.
Calculator:
Read the rest of this entry…
Posted in Banking, Tools & Calculators | 13 Comments »
Tuesday, January 10th, 2006
I whipped out my ancient how-to-make-a-website book, and made a simple but handy JavaScript calculator for calculating the equivalent bank CD rate for a given T-Bill or Savings Bond rate, as the interest from them are exempt from local and state taxes. This uses the rate conversion formula previously given. Remember, marginal means the tax rate at which your last earned dollar is taxed. Please try it out and let me know if something’s broken:
Calculator:
For example, at my 25% Fed and 9% State tax rates, the current 4.14% rate for a 4-week T-Bill is the equivalent of a 1-month bank CD earning 4.70% annualized.
Note: The above calculator does not assume that you will itemize deductions and deduct your state taxes from your federal taxes. Even if you do itemize, I would note that everyone gets the standard deduction, so it’s not necessarily fully deductible.
Useful Resources:
Recent T-Bill auction results
2006 Federal Tax Rates
State Income Tax Rates
Posted in Savings Bonds, Tools & Calculators, Treasury Bills and Bonds | 23 Comments »
Thursday, October 13th, 2005
If you apply to as many offers as I do, you can’t afford the ink to print all those Terms and Conditions out. But it is really critical to save the details of everything you apply for, in case you need to fight for your money later. Companies change offers or take down their offer websites all the time. The solution? A free PDF Printer Driver called PDFCreator. Once installed, just do File > Print like usual but choose ‘PDFCreator’ as your printer, and out comes a nice Adobe Acrobat PDF File! The time you printed it out is even included. Also great for saving online statements.
Example: The 0% APR Discover card offer here has no mention of a balance transfer fee in the Terms and Conditions. But now, I have a .PDF of the complete T and C’s saved on my hard disk if there is any dispute.
Posted in Tools & Calculators | 5 Comments »
Sunday, May 1st, 2005
As other bloggers have mentioned, USA Today is currently doing a six-week series on how to go on a “Financial Diet“. Nothing ground-breaking, but it’s a pretty good read with stories from real-life families and tips on how to reduce debt and save more. Last week (Week 2), the focus was How to Make (and stick to) a Budget, which is exactly what I’m trying to do right now.
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Posted in Tools & Calculators | 4 Comments »
Thursday, April 28th, 2005
Ok, after digging a little bit more about how to manually import my transactions from VirtualBank and Presidential Bank into Quicken 2005, I find out… I can’t. Not only that, the reason is just stupid greed in my opinion. Both Microsoft Money and Quicken 2005 use the OFX format for exchanging financial data, but Money still allows you to import data using the popular .pif format. Quicken? Not only does it not allow you to import data using the .pif at all, it evens cripples your software to not accept OFX files unless your bank pays them.
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Posted in Tools & Calculators | 9 Comments »
Wednesday, April 27th, 2005
Ok, so after “reconciling” tons of transactions with Money 2005, I went ahead and purchased Quicken 2005 on the way home yesterday. I figure, the $60 is worth it in the long run if I can get my budget in order and improve on it, and I got MS Money cheap. I’m not giving up on Money just yet, I just want to find the best product for me.
First impressions? I only installed it last night, but downloading transactions for most banks has been smoother than with Money, everything balanced out right. However, some banks, like VirtualBank and Presidential Bank, don’t seem to export in Quicken’s new format. May the best personal finance software win.
Posted in Tools & Calculators | 3 Comments »
Wednesday, April 20th, 2005
This is slightly off-topic, but I’m constantly annoyed that whenever you want to simply read a news story or use their “free” service, sites often make you register and provide your name, e-mail, address, etc. I mean, it’s obvious that the only reason to do that is to (1) get demographic information for advertisers and (2) to sell your e-mail and contact info to those advertisers. Please note that MyMoneyBlog does not record or share any e-mail addresses left in the comments. In fact, an e-mail address isn’t even required to post.
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Posted in Tools & Calculators | 4 Comments »
