iBudget

December 26, 2007 7:42 PM

What's the best budgeting/personal finance for my Intel iMac running 10.5.1?

It seems that Quicken doesn't work on Intel Macs and that it has terrible reviews on Amazon. Ideally, I would like:

1) Something that I can automatically import financial information from my banks/financial institutions and track capital gains and losses/savings and credit card rates, etc
2) Something that can help tailor a budget for me, makes suggestions, etc
3) Something that is very easy to use. My natural state is disorganization I am better at organizing things that are easy to KEEP organized.
4) Something that can download my credit report when I want it to.

posted by Pants! to computers & internet (12 answers total)

Never mind. I had this open in a tab but hadn't read it yet.
posted by Pants! at 7:47 PM on December 26, 2007

I know you said nevermind, but I just wanted to say that I run Quicken in my Intel Mac. I don't recommend it, in particular, but it works just fine.
posted by The corpse in the library at 7:50 PM on December 26, 2007

Might I suggest Mint, it's been very useful for me, someone for whom financial organization has never come easily . . .
posted by jeremias at 8:09 PM on December 26, 2007

I am another person who runs Quicken on an Intel Mac and I cannot stand it. Not being able to run Microsoft Money is my *only* regret in switching. Will definitely check out Mint.
posted by Slarty Bartfast at 9:39 PM on December 26, 2007

Yodlee Moneycenter is an online app that does all of what you want. Yodlee is the engine behind Mint.com, and I find that Moneycenter is much more powerful and actually easier to use despite all of Mint's Web 2.0 bling.
posted by zsazsa at 9:48 PM on December 26, 2007

Fixed link for Yodlee Moneycenter.
posted by zsazsa at 9:49 PM on December 26, 2007

Wow, I almost posted this exact question tonight myself (except I'm on 10.4). I know Pants! found that old thread, but I'd love to hear more suggestions or experiences.
posted by DakotaPaul at 12:13 AM on December 27, 2007

Another webapp suggestion: wesabe.com
posted by mphuie at 1:05 AM on December 27, 2007

There's always Gnucash, which you can install through MacPorts if you're feeling brave. I used this for a while on a linux virtual machine from my Windows desktop, a couple of years ago, but the inconvenience/slow speed problems were too obnoxious. Now that I have OS X, I've been thinking about trying it again.
posted by Alterscape at 8:08 AM on December 27, 2007

I feel uncomfortable having all my financial information aggregated on a website rather than on my computer. Am I irrational?
posted by Pants! at 4:10 PM on December 27, 2007

I feel uncomfortable having all my financial information aggregated on a website rather than on my computer. Am I irrational?

Maybe, maybe not. I access my bank, brokerage, 401(k) etc via their websites. There is nothing insecure about the medium - it is the matter of how much you trust a 3rd party. Yodlee is pretty much the gold standard - many banks and other institutions contract Yodlee to provide their "in-house" web-based offerings. The others you have to evaluate based on partial knowledge of their own descriptions of their security practices.

I have toyed with Yodlee, Wesabe, Mint, Cake, and they are definitely useful, but in my mind none replaces Quicken/MS Money. Especially for budgeting, the ability to query years of data for expense patterns can only be done "offline". It also doesn't help that I have not committed fully to using, say Wesabe or Mint for my primary repository of financial data - so I am not willing to tag my transactions twice (once online, once offline). And since I am a devout believer in data portability (and having seen no way to export/download all of the work I could put into an online financial website), I end up just categorizing my money offline. Because the metadata is too important to trust to a startup company on the web.

As for Mac software, I have yet to find a really great option. I demo'ed about every money app I could find when I switched to Mac earlier this year, and none had the industry support of Quicken or Money -- so I would have been relegated to manually downloading and importing bank statements. I decided that my time was worth more than that, so I am currently using MS Money 2007 running in a virtual machine. I am debating whether to buy Quicken 2008 when it is released.
posted by misterbrandt at 10:49 AM on December 28, 2007 [1 favorite]

Oh actually, it looks like Mint does allow you to export transactions. No idea if the metadata is included, however.
posted by misterbrandt at 3:08 PM on December 28, 2007