The key to building your net worth and getting the maximum returns on your investments lies in the efficient management of your personal finance. Depending on your requirements, you can get tools that will manage your investment portfolio, look after your budgeting and track your expenses or even build financially prudent habits that safeguard your financial health in the future. A brief look at some of the most effective financial management tools that you can use to achieve a diverse set of financial goals:
Best Finance Tools
Quicken
Quicken is today among the most established personal finance tools available. Its robust architecture and useful feature set have made it extremely popular for several decades now. With Quicken, you can manage several aspects of your financial life from budgeting, setting savings goals, debt monitoring, and even learn from investment management tutorials. You can also set up a schedule for paying your bills and allow it to pay them automatically from your linked bank account. Calculation of your net worth periodically becomes very easy with the tool being able to track your assets and liabilities. The diversity of its features can be appreciated by the fact that the tool even has a function that handles rental receivables from your tenants making property management less troublesome. You can export all the data to an Excel worksheet so that you can manipulate the data as well as perform additional calculations on the data. Quicken is available on both the Windows and Mac operating systems and has app versions for your smartphone too.
Mint
Budgeting and expense tracking is one of the most vital financial management activities that you need to undertake. Mint is unarguably one of the most popular budgeting tools that give users a comprehensive array of useful features. You can input the details of your credit cards and bank accounts and the tool will automatically pick up information to analyze your spending habits and suggest areas where economizing could help to improve your finances. You can set up reminders and alerts so that you never miss making a payment by the due date. This will help you to avoid the stiff penalties and late payment charges by credit card companies and other lenders that add to the debt trap that can only be resolved with the intervention of expert debt management agencies like NationaldebtRelief.com. By setting up different budget categories, Mint can track your spends and inform you of the amounts you have at your disposal to spend on the different categories. According to https://www.forbes.com, the new “MintSights” feature can provide several personalized recommendations for activities like creating a budget, organizing debt consolidation, and growing your investment portfolio.
YNAB
YNAB or You Need A budget is one of those personal finance tools that seeks to help you to manage your budgets while assisting you to learn more about financial prudence and achieving long-term financial objectives. The highly intuitive software creates and manages the budgets as per your inputs and also delivers useful learning tutorials that help you to comprehend some of the more complex financial topics. YNAB is especially helpful for people who are struggling with financial habits that create a never-ending debt burden by implementing basic financial management rules that can help them to get back on even keel. YNAB has a provision for linking your bank account so that your spends can be automatically analyzed to keep you informed whether you are being able to stay within the budgets that you had earlier created. YNAB restricts itself to only budgetary monitoring and analysis and does not provide users with any portfolio management capabilities.
Mvelopes
Before the advent of computer-based budgeting systems, it was the practice among people to create different envelopes for different activities for keeping the cash budgeted for each activity. For example, if you have allocated $300 for your living expenses, you keep it in an envelope and only spend from that amount for the living expenses. As the money gets depleted, you can track it and adjust your expenses accordingly over the remainder of the budget period. Mvelopes adopts the same system albeit on a digital platform. You can use the tool to set up as many digital envelopes as you like depending on what you want to do, link your bank accounts, and specify the amount of money available. Mvelopes automatically creates a budget and sets up all the different envelopes with different amounts of money allocated to each as per your specifications. The tool, thereafter, keeps on tracking your expenses and displays the balances of each envelope so that you can adjust your spending accordingly for the entire month.
TurboTax
Tax time can indeed be very taxing when it comes and TurboTax is the perfect tool to come to your rescue at this time. The tax preparation tool is extremely comprehensive and consumer-friendly. It is equipped with the ability to walk you through the entire process of preparing your tax returns while ensuring that no errors are made that can prove costly. The process of entering the information could not be simpler; you can input the data from the W-2 form issued by the employer manually or just take a picture of the form for the tool to transfer the information automatically to its data fields to prepare the return. The tool is capable of remembering past information entered by you and asks if any information needs to be updated. While the free version is good enough for those filing only a Federal 1040EZ or 1040A, the paid versions include many more functionalities, including maximization of tax deductions that are commonly overlooked. The TurboTax Live feature can connect you with a CPA to access personalized information and get answers to questions specific to your tax return.
Conclusion
Using software tools to manage your personal finance can take almost all the hassle out of the process. You get accurate and updated information regarding your budgets, advice on how to stick to your budget by controlling your spending, as well as a whole host of money management functions that make life easier, including tax return preparation, a job most people detest.
