Personal Finance Software (2018 Edition)
June 20, 2018 8:54 AM   Subscribe

I'm looking for software to help me understand the family's finances. I'm interested in long term questions (Am I putting enough money into my pension scheme?) rather than day-to-day spending questions (Am I spending too much money on coffee?).

I'd prefer software for PC, but software for Mac would be okay too.

Bonus points if I can indulge my taste for producing interesting graphs!

(I know that questions like this have been asked before, but the last such question was in 2016, and software might have advanced since then … )
posted by HoraceH to Work & Money (5 answers total) 5 users marked this as a favorite
 
Best answer: Have you looked at Personal Capital at all? Personal Capital is like Mint for people with investments. There's plenty it doesn't do but it does have a lot more future-casting than any other free in-browser thing I've used, and it may be worth checking out.
posted by phunniemee at 9:10 AM on June 20, 2018 [2 favorites]


Projection is one of those aspects of personal finance tools that feels really neglected / not at all addressed - I know it's completely lacking in mint, and it was lacking in my brief dalliance with You Need A Budget (version 4, the last not-cloud version anyway). I'd say I'm more interested in the mid-term (next 5 years) type projections, and none of the cloud tools I've encountered seem to do much of that.

For longer term, investment monte carlo simulation stuff (like modelling pension investment amounts), firecalc is a simple but effective tool. Answer some simple "I spend this much a year, I save this much a year, I retire in X years and will save Y dollars until then" type questions, play around a bit with the different inflation and spending models, and quickly get a feel for the historical outcomes of your current circumstances. (Past performance is not yadda yadda yadda)
posted by namewithoutwords at 4:21 PM on June 20, 2018 [2 favorites]


Have you poked around on your pension manager's website? T. Rowe Price's site, for example, has a tool called FuturePath, that allows you to enter additional accounts, one time events, salary info, and assumptions and then runs 1,000 simulations to estimate future assets and gives a score.
posted by amarynth at 5:59 AM on June 21, 2018 [1 favorite]


I've looked around for something like this and haven't had much luck -- seems to be something that's moved to online-only platforms. Morningstar might be worth checking out if you're looking for allocation analysis (and they do have some nice charts & graphs); I've never signed up with Morningstar, but they offer a 2 week free trial. (T. Rowe Price offers the Morningstar service for free through their site, if you happen to have an account there.)
posted by Bron at 7:26 AM on June 21, 2018 [1 favorite]


Response by poster: Thank you for all your replies!

It’s a shame that there aren’t better options out there, but I think that Personal Capital (when combined woth other tools) will be good enough.
posted by HoraceH at 12:58 PM on June 22, 2018


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