April 18, 2010 in adult decisions, money,
OK, now that I’m an adult — or, at least pretending to be one — I have to start making adult finance decisions. The inaugural post-marriage decision here seems to be: what car to get DJ L’il Bit.
So the background is this: we both have the same philosophy in cars, that is, buy a nice used car and drive it until it dies, sputtering, by the side of the road. This is why DJ L’il Bit has been driving around in her 1995 VW Golf and me in my 1996 Lexus for a few years now. The Golf had been clearly nearing the end of its life around the time we got married, and, in fact, died sputtering by the side of the road a couple of times. That got to be too much, so now we’re in the replacement car market.
Our first reflex was to buy another used car in reasonably good shape and drive it into the ground. DJ L’il Bit has long wanted a convertible, and, since we live in sunny SoCal, this seems a reasonable desire to fulfill. However, there’s a catch: based on our Life Plan, there’ll be kids on the way in something between 2-4 years. A cute 2-seat convertible won’t be too practical when we have to fit a baby seat. Plus, a 4-to-5-year-old cute convertible with 40,000 miles will be 7-9 years old with 100,000 miles when the baby comes around and we’re not sure we’d want to drive a new baby around in any car that old. So that probably means: new car ‘round baby time.
Then, if we sell the cute convertible 2-4 years + many thousands of miles, well, we’re not going to make a lot back, probably.
If we’re only keeping the car a few years, all of a sudden the ROI on a cash outlay to own the thing doesn’t seem very high. And that makes us think of something we’d never considered before: leasing. We’ve found a lease on a cute, brand new Mini convertible that seems to be about 3/4 the price of buying a used one with low mileage. We’d probably have to pay a penalty to get out of the lease early, but that still adds up to about the same as the cost of the used car, and that doesn’t even factor in the cost of the expected difference in reliability between the two cars.
Which brings me to my question: I know that, most of the time, the smartest thing to do financially is to buy a used car and run it into the ground. But, in this case, it seems smarter to take the lease. Or, am I missing something? I know the friends I have who read this are skilled in the math department and maybe even know a few things about the world. What am I missing here?
April 10, 2010 in mac, reviews, money,
I need a personal finance program. You know, to track money on hand and budgets and stuff. I figured it’d be pretty easy, what with it being a major product category for something like a decade and a half now. Not so much; apparently I’m a demanding customer. Said demands — not letters-cut-out-of-magazines-pasted-into-message-sent-anonymously-style demands, just plain old consumer expectation-style demands — included:
- I can enter transactions (you know, rather than just having them auto-downloaded for me)
- Auto-reconcile download transactions from multiple banks and credit cards
- Multiple separate budgets (you know, so that I can have one for me and one for the family)
- View budgets on iPhone app
- Enter transactions on iPhone app and sync to desktop
- Runs on Mac
That’s all! That doesn’t seem like much to me. However, it’s been harder than I’d expected; nothing out there so far has made the grade. I’ve tried:
What about Quicken?
Quicken is the obvious answer, unfortunately there’s no matching iPhone app. From experience, I know that, if I don’t enter the transaction shortly after I make it, I’ll just end up with a pile of receipts and an out-of-date budget. Similarly, Moneydance and Moneywell both have iPhone apps coming but… not yet.
What about Mint?
I was happily using Mint for a few years, but it just didn’t match my life anymore. It didn’t have multiple budgets, which was an annoyance. But the killer is that I can’t enter transactions in it. We pay our rent with a check, since our landlord is just some lady who owns a few houses, and there are a few other people we pay with checks every month too; none of these fine people deposits checks promptly, so cash in our bank account can exceed cash actually available by thousands of dollars for a couple of weeks every month. This makes Mint’s picture of our finances pretty unenlightening.
So I tried the rest:
iBank
iBank has a great desktop program. It’s easy-to-use, good-looking, and is one of the few that lets you budget by more than just category. Unfortunately, the iPhone version doesn’t have budgets, and is designed in such a way as to suggest that they don’t really mean to include budgets. That’s a killer for me. However, if you want direct download from your bank, like Quicken offers, iBank is one of the few with this feature.
Cha-Ching
Cha-Ching actually does everything mentioned here! Feature-wise, it’s a clear winner. Otherwise, it doesn’t appear to be under active development anymore and so I just didn’t feel comfortable committing to it. It’s hard to put all your financial data in a program that won’t be updated to match future changes.
Money
Money was the early leader here, with all of the features… except it’s not very smart about auto-reconciling. If the transaction date in the download doesn’t match the date you entered it, Money doesn’t know to match it and Money offers no way to manually match downloaded transactions to existing ones. This is more frustrating than it seems, at least to me, since my bank and credit cards provide the posting date, rather than the date the transaction occurred, in downloads. The posting date is sometime between the same day and up to 5 or 6 days later, depending on the practices of the place you buy, I believe. Naturally, I entered transactions on the date they occurred. Having dozens of duplicated transactions because of this date disagreement was a killer to me. However, if that’s not a problem for you, then the budgeting here was as good as iBank.
Squirrel
Squirrel is almost perfect. The desktop version is actually rather lovely, although you’re limited to budgeting by category. But the iPhone version crashes every time I look at my budget. So there goes the whole budget thing.
iCompta
Same date problem as Money. Also, weird and French.
I’m not sure what’s next. Do I abandon the requirement for a budget on my iPhone and either accept Squirrel, with the promise of maybe future budget bug busting, or iBank, with no budget but the only support for Direct Download à la Quicken? Do I choose Quicken and give up on having “an app for that”? Do I wait to see if Moneywell and Moneydance have good iPhone apps? What do you think?
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