Managing Your Money with MoneyWell

In these challenging economic times, managing personal income and spending is one of the most important tasks we can do to decrease our debt and establish better financial security for ourselves and our family. According to the 2009 Consumer Financial Literacy Survey, 41 percent of U.S. adults gave themselves a grade C or below for their own knowledge of personal finance. (Money Management 101)

But in the age of digital technology, financial management is significantly easier than the analog checking book of tracking expenses. There are web- and desktop-based programs that make money management less and less of a chore. If you're an iPhone or iPod touch user, a few inexpensive apps like Spend and Accounts-Checkbook (iTunes Music Store Store link) make it easier to track your spending and budget on-the-go.

Becoming Financially Literate

One of the first ways to become more literate about your finances is to simply balance your checking account and monitor your credit expenses on a weekly basis. Programs like Quicken and QuickBooks are very popular, but these programs are not up-to-date for the Leopard operating system, and they may also include non-essential features and a high learning curve for average users.

Well, No Thirst Software has produced a simple but feature-rich application for managing your financial accounts, called MoneyWell. MoneyWell has a straight forward, single window, interface in which you can download transactions from your banking, credit card and other accounts, and assign those transactions to various expense categories, or "Buckets," as they are called in MoneyWell. Importing transactions from say your bank account means of course that you don't have to waist time recording data manually, as you would with a checking book.

The only significant time requirement for using an application like MoneyWell is tagging individual transactions with an expense category. So for example every transaction you make with McDonalds would be tagged under a Fast Food category. Car payments and gasoline purchases can be tagged as an automobile expense. MoneyWell comes with a list of default expense categories, but you can customize expense categories for your own particular needs. After assigning a tag to one or more transactions, you can have MoneyWell memorize assigned tags and other data for similar transactions.

MoneyWell also includes a feature called Spending Plan which you use to set up  budgets, for say variable expenses and discretionary items. This feature is equally important because while the first step to financial management may be balancing your checkbook, the next step is to budget your spending. It's quite revealing to discover just how much money you're throwing out weekly or monthly for items such as fast food, computer software, or even iPhone applications.

Finally, MoneyWell includes a reporting feature that gives you charted data for your income and expenses over specified weeks and months, including your tagged budgets. This reporting feature is readily visible in MoneyWell's single window interface. Total dollar amounts for each "bucket" category are also visible so that you're always aware of the amount of money you've spent.

No Thirst Software is also working on an iPhone app that will sync with the desktop client. This application will be a nifty time saver, especially if a debit card is what you use for nearly all your financial transactions.

Suggestions for Use

After downloading and setting up MoneyWell, choose a day each week to balance your checking account using MoneyWell. I use a couple of Automator actions (see here for a tutorial) to have MoneyWell and websites for two of my financial institutions to  download and open on Thursdays at 8:00 a.m., so when I arrive at my computer, I simply take about 10 minutes to update my accounts and check my budgets before doing other tasks. Because I also track my expenses on my iPhone, it's easy to cross reference and match transactions in my banking, Paypal, and credit card accounts with what I've inputed on my iPhone.

I've used Quicken for several years, but for me MoneyWell‘s interface is cleaner and simpler to use for my personal and small business needs. Spending $50 for MoneyWell and using it effectively on a weekly basis will save you money over time.

As part of this review, I interviewed the developer for MoneyWell, Kevin Hector.