Ben Roy

I'm a big budgeting guy, which I accomplished for the longest time with Microsoft Money. It may not have been the best application in the world, but it worked pretty well for budgeting (for me). As long as I was using it, I really felt like I had a handle on my finances, like I was in control.

Well, a while back Microsoft announced that they would no longer be supporting Money. Great, my favorite money tool was cancelled. So I knew at some point I was going to need something new.

I found my way to Mint, which has since been purchased by Quicken (Intuit). Mint is a completely free money management tool, in the form of a website so there's nothing to download or install. Privacy/security concerns notwithstanding, they do a pretty nice job of grabbing your data and organizing it in a meaningful way.

But there's a problem: their categories are all fixed. They allow you to add your own sub-categories, but the top level categories (and all of the pre-filled sub-categories) are system defined and can't be changed, re-arranged, or re-named. Is that really a big deal? YES!

I use an extremely simple budgeting scheme where everything rolls up to one of 5 different categories. With Money, I could arrange the categories any way I wanted within the budget, which gave me the roll-up effect that I wanted. With Mint, no such luck. But I decided to give it a go anyway, and just went with detailed budget items instead of my nice, high level categories.

After a number of months I realized the level of frustration and stress resulting from this setup. I no longer felt on top of my finances; I definitely wasn't experiencing that out-of-mind sensation that comes from being completely at ease with your money. It came to a head this week after buying a new computers and also trying to look forward to the summer and purchases that need to be made.

So...I went looking for a new solution. And settled on trying out Wesabe, which has a similar setup to Mint. It's a website offering free money management. They have the exact opposite take on categories that Mint does though: they are 100% user defined. And instead of being hierarchical, they are unstructured. So I can mix and match any tags I want on any transaction, and set up budgets that go in any 'direction' I want.

I haven't gotten all the way through the setup or fixing up the budget for the year so far, but the bit that I did tells me that I'm really going to enjoy it.

I'll probably talk about my budgeting method one of these days.