I’ve been using quicken for almost 3 years, just managing the day-to-day, month-to-month budgeting of my family’s finances. It worked alright but it wasn’t great. I didn’t have the ability to send my wife information. She didn’t have the ability to see if checks she’s written had cleared, or what bills needed to be paid. And I didn’t have a way to access my information remotely.
A couple weeks ago, I was compaining about this to my Brother, and said he had started using http://www.mint.com/. I only been using it a couple weeks but it is awesome and also its free.
It has the ability to query my bank account, and retrieve transactions. It can pull down my 401k information so I can see how depressed I should be. It supports email or texting for various types of alerts, like large deposits or that you’re over budget. It has some nifty charting, and ways to compare your expenses that are similar to quicken, but they are accessible anywhere, anytime.
My only gripe about it: I can’t import my quicken file. I’d probably even pay for it, if they could import it for me. You also can’t back date, or create new transactions. So you couldn’t import it manually if you wanted to.
