Here are some of the features of GoalHappy that stood out to me and that you may also be interested in:

• Break up goals.  As I mentioned you can break them up into more specific and measureable goals by day, week or month. 
• Share your goals and send updates to your friends via Facebook
• Access your goals from your mobile device such as an iphone
• It’s free and helps you achieve your personal finance goals

How to use GoalHappy for your personal finance goals

Excited about the possiblities of this new tool, I started brainstorming how people might use it to make some progress on their personal finance goals.  Here is a list of 10 ideas for you to consider.

1. Identify your current goal on the Crown Money Map or Baby Steps.  Let’s say it’s save $1000 for an emergency fund.  Well, break that down into daily, weekly or a monthly goal.  Perhaps your monthly goal is to save $100 towards your larger goal.  Now you can create that goal, share it and track it. 
2. Create a daily goal to track your spending
3. Create a weekly goal to talk about your finances with your spouse
4. Create a daily goal not to spend more than X amount
5. Create a daily goal not to use a credit card for purchases
6. Create a monthly goal to pay X amount towards debt reduction
7. Set up a monthly goal to read 5 personal finance articles
8. Set up a daily goal to read X minutes from your current personal finance book
9. Set up a daily goal to spend 15 minutes learning more about what the Bible has to say about money
10. Set up a weekly goal to review your spending habits in your personal budget tracking software

Of course, these are just ideas.  You have to come up with the goals that make the most sense for your situation.  Try out GoalHappy and let me know what you think about the tool.   It took me just a few seconds to sign up and start using it myself.  Overall, it’s user friendly and intuitive.

What are some other ideas for goals or how you could leverage this tool to achieve your personal finance goals?

1. Transactions are downloaded from your bank or credit card company so you don’t have to write them down.
2. Deposits can be allocated to different spending categories.
3. Balances are automatically calculated.  You don’t have to do all the adding and subtracting yourself.
4. Software keeps tracking of budget category balances, but also maintains an online account register (as you would keep in your checkbook).
5. Run reports to see spending per category for different time periods.  This is helpful if you want to see how much you’ve spent on food monthly for the last year.
6. Set up bill pay to pay from any account.  No more writing checks!
7. Mobile view of budget and spending.  As with tracking your spending in a pocket book, mobile access allows you to view your balances on your cell phone or mobile device such as an iPhone.
8. Auto assignment rules.  To save even more time you can set up rules to automatically assign transactions for certain payees to an appropriate category.
9. Net worth calculation allows you to see at a glance your net worth considering each of your accounts and other liabilities.
10. Automatically fund envelopes or categories by setting up funding plans.  Once you set up your spending plan you simply auto-fund each spending category when your paycheck deposit is downloaded from the bank.

There are a lot of personal budget tracking software products available today.  I haven’t come across any so far I like as well as how Mvelopes Personal helps with the budgeting aspect of personal finance.  However, I’m a believer of finding software that fits your needs and preferences the best.  In fact, I’ll also take this opportunity to mention Mint which is the most popular personal finance software available.  While I don’t use Mint right today, I have heard many great things about it.  For one, it’s free.   It also has an appealing and easy to use interface.  I prefer the online envelope style to maintaining our personal budget and tracking spending, but Mint also has a budget feature that is worth reviewing if you’re considering multiple products.

No matter your choice, budget tracking software helps save time, improve accuracy and can help you learn more about your spending characteristics (good or bad) to became a better steward of your finances.

What budget tracking software do you use?  What do you think are some of the benefits of budgeting tracking software?

4 Features of Mvelopes

1. Envelopes Budgeting

Envelopes budgeting has been around a long time. In short, the premise is to use cash envelopes to manage your money. You simply create an envelope for every major budget category and deposit cash into it according to your written plan. You use the cash to make purchases and when the cash is gone you’re done spending.

Mvelopes has taken a manual process as described above and automated it. With Mvelopes you set up electronic envelopes to manage your cash flow. As expenses are recorded, the amount is deducted from the virtual envelope giving you a quick way to see the balance of each budget category. As you watch the balances while you spend, you’re much less likely to overspend and in some cases save money. offers some features that put it in the top tier. They seem to do it right by offering some classic styles of budgeting on an electronic platform.

2. Transfer Money Between Budget Envelopes

As with a cash envelope, you might have money left over in a budget category and need to spend more in another area. With Mvelopes you can electronically transfer money from one envelope to another keeping your budget in balance. For example, let’s say you have under spent $30 on groceries for the month. You could easily allocate the extra money to cover the need for more gasoline, or to savings.

3. Allocate Income for Budget envelopes

With cash envelopes you withdrawal money from the bank after your paycheck is deposited and insert the proper amount into each of your physical envelopes. The equivalent is provided with Mvelopes by allowing you to set up funding plans which enable you to determine how you want to allocate money for your paychecks. Once you receive your deposit transaction into Mvelopes you choose your funding plan which deposits your money into each virtual envelope.

4. Drag and Drop Features of Mvelopes

Once transactions are downloaded from your financial institution, you can drag and drop them to an expense envelope, or to your income cash pool for funding. This feature saves quite a bit of time for assigning transactions to their respective budget category or envelope.

There are many features of Mvelopes, but these four features seem to provide a lot of help in enhancing personal money management.

Personally, I don’t think I could live without using personal finance software. Some people choose to reconcile their checkbooks and maintain a budget manually; there is nothing wrong with this. Software can provide efficiency and exactness that is sometimes hard to get with a manual approach, but at the end of the day people should choose the approach that works best for them.

Do you have any experience working with Mvelopes?  If so let us know about your favorite features in the comments.

Mvelopes has a 14 day free trial.  I recommend signing up for the free trial to test it out for your needs.

This is an article I originally posted at Christian Personal Finance.

Personally, you’ll usually find me recommending Mvelopes because of its unique design around the envelope budgeting concept.  Envelope budgeting is a proven method that works well for planning and controlling monthly expenses.

Mint has brought a new perspective to personal finance software.  Mint helps find you ways to save money by “comparing your needs to product, bank or service offerings” (as mentioned on their website).

Differences between Mint and Mvelopes

I’ve always been curious about the differences between the two products.  In the past I haven’t considered Mint seriously because it didn’t have budgeting capabilities.  They have not implemented a budget module in the product.

To learn more I signed up for my free account with Mint and also reached out to my Twitter network to see if anyone had experience using both products.  Wojciech at Fiscal Fizzle immediately sent me a reply message letting me know he’s used both of them and would be willing to help answer some of my questions.

So, without further ado, here are Wojciech’s responses to my questions about Mvelopes and Mint.

Mvelopes is known for automating envelope budgeting, does Mint have a similar capability or budgeting feature?

Mint does feature a budgeting module, and you can set it up to “roll over” from month to month, which is kind of like having an envelope, especially for irregular transactions. However, this is still a “traditional” budget setup, where you set an upper limit, not a $0 limit. It’s a small distinction, but I believe it makes a big psychological difference.

Mvelopes takes my bank account balance and tells me what job each dollar has, including regular expenses like loan payments or rent. Mint tells me how much I can spend in each category (usually discretionary expenses are what most people set up), without considering the whole picture.

Note from Jason: I think the $0 budget is important in avoiding over spending and staying on track with savings, debt reduction, etc.  For those who don’t know, a $0 budget means you find a purpose for every dollar each month and balance your income and expenses.

What is your favorite feature of Mint that Mvelopes doesn’t have?  What is your favorite feature of Mvelopes that Mint doesn’t have?

My favorite Mint feature is alerts – I get weekly summaries of my activity, as well as large deposit and withdrawal alerts.  My favorite Mvelopes feature is the program’s automatic ability to set aside money whenever I charge something on my credit card to pay it off at the end of the month.

Note from Jason: I noticed there are a lot of different alert options with Mint which I think could be quite handy for staying on top of your finances.  Examples include bill reminders, low balance reminders and unusual spending notifications.

Social networking or the ability to learn from or leverage cost savings from others has become a feature in some products today.  How do you think that either product provides these benefits?

Mvelopes is starting to develop some social features – currently, they have a blog that showcases “success stories” and tips, and a Twitter account. Mvelopes also has forums for interacting with other users and getting help, “groups,” where people with similar goals can join together, and “mentor” forums, where individuals of specific expertise can help you. All of these are mostly in their infancy, so their potential is just getting developed.

Mint also has a blog with some very useful tip-based posts, which is something Mvelopes is only starting to incorporate. They are also starting to leverage social networking intra-software, by providing features like comparisons to “average US spending” when budgeting. They’ve also made finances “fun” by integrating a point system for doing certain things with your money, although some of those clearly benefit Mint financially via affiliate income.

Note from Jason: I’ve become a regular follower of Mint’s blog which produces great personal finance content.  I think Mint is well ahead of Mvelopes when it comes to incorporating social networking into their product and website.  I would like to see Mvelopes make a stronger move in this area since there is real value in learning from and interacting with others.

• Follow Mint via Twitter and RSS.
• Follow Mvelopes via Twitter and RSS.

Care to share which one you use today and why?

90% of our financials are currently done in Mvelopes. Prior to this year, I used desktop Quicken almost exclusively, but felt that it was inadequate in preparing us for irregular expenses and motivating us to save for various goals. Now, we have issues with neither, and we also don’t argue about money as much as we used to. It’s no longer any one person’s decision whether we “can” or “cannot” buy something – if the money’s not in that specific envelope, it’s not available. The peace of mind in knowing that everything that needs to be there will be there when I need it (or by how much we’re short) is incredible.

The other 10% of my time is spent in Mint, mostly looking at overall net worth and investment performance, as well as reading their blog.

Note from Jason:  I agree that having a set of envelopes and their associated balances helps when it comes to talking about money with your spouse.  This is the heart of our money meeting conversation each week. 

Anything else you’d like to share?

Many people shy away from pay-based tools like Mvelopes because we expect almost everything to be free these days. I can tell you that there’s no free lunch – even Mint uses affiliate-based “suggestions” that drive me nuts. The money we pay for Mvelopes has paid itself off ten-fold.

Final thoughts

Whether or not you use Mint or Mvelopes, I hope you’ll find some of this information helpful in your use of either product, or perhaps in your decision to use one of them.  As I mentioned, I signed up to test drive Mint a little bit.  I’ll continue to explore this product and perhaps provide a review of my findings and what I’ve learned in a future post.   But for now I’m planning to continue using Mvelopes as my primary personal finance software tool.

Mvelopes has a 14 day free trial.  I recommend signing up for the free trial to create test envelopes and transactions to better understand how the software works and to make sure it’s a fit for you.

What about you?  Have you had experience with either Mint or Mvelopes?  If so, feel free to share answers to any of the same questions I asked Wojciech with readers in the comments.

Special thanks to Wojciech!

Wojciech Kulicki is the blogger behind Fiscal Fizzle, a personal finance blog that emphasizes sound principles, simplicity, critical thinking, and money paradigms. Wojciech likes to show you money in new and unique ways.  Follow him via RSS or Twitter!

Mint is not shabby either.  It has been around a few years and has already gained much publicity for its features and model for helping people save money through the use of its free online software.

The business transaction builds Intuits inventory of products and allows them to absorb an expanding competitor.   They no longer have to worry about Mint soaking up users or market share from them because they are now a part of the same family.

What is Mint saying?

CEO commented in a recent blog post about the merger and how their approach could be expanded to more consumers including new spaces.

It’s a great opportunity that could bring Mint’s unique approach to personal financial management to millions more consumers and small businesses as well as the 1,800 banks and credit unions serviced by Intuit.

What is Intuit saying?

This big news is especially exciting because Intuit and Mint.com share a common goal: help consumers do more with their money with innovative, easy-to-use online services.

Having joined up with Intuit, Mint now has more resources behind their product which means it can expand and reach more people.  Apparently, Mint’s product development staff is now going to take the leading role in owning the product development road map for both organizations.

After the acquisition closes, the Mint.com team will be leading the development of both Mint.com and Intuit’s existing personal finance products, Quicken desktop and Quicken Online. The fact that Intuit has agreed to acquire Mint.com, and is leaving our team intact, is evidence that Intuit has been impressed by and wants to build upon the user experience that Mint.com offers. We’ll not only improve upon that experience for Mint.com but also bring our know-how to the Quicken product line. Destroying the Mint.com user experience does not make sense for Intuit, Mint.com or any of our users.

Questions with the acquisition

While neither company can really tell us exactly how all of this is going to play out until after the acquisition closes later in the year, it does raise some interesting questions.

• Both products operate in the same space today.  How will both products coexist?  Apparently, this is the case in the short-term.
• Certainly, Mint has features Quicken lacks and visa versa.  If each product remains stand-alone, will they adapt new features from each other?
• Could we see other acquisitions in the future?  Is this a starting trend of a consolidation of personal finance software?
• Will the products be consolidated into one application with the best of both features?  Update:  Consumerism Commentary conducted an interview with Mint’s CEO, Aaron Patzer regarding the Acquisition.  Aaron will be heading up personal finance product development for Intuit.  Apparently, Quicken online will be replaced by Mint.  Listen to the podcast here.

What is my prediction?  I think this will be much more than a business transaction.  In other words, I think we’ll either see the software grow together or become completely distinct in the respective services of features and niches of customers.  Hopefully, both organizations will not lose site of their customers and continue to look at the market place to determine what the end user really needs to manage their personal finances better.

What are your thoughts on the business transaction and what do you see for the future of Mint and Quicken?

Read more about the acquisition and what both Mint and Intuit are saying on their blogs.

• Mint.com to Join the Intuit Family
• Why Mint.com + Intuit is a Big Idea

Weekly Round Up

I’m pleased to announce my article, How to Find a New Job, was included in The Carnival of Personal Finance #222 – Live from Monticello! this week hosted by SimplyForties.

Rather than provide articles I’ve read around the personal finance blogosphere this week, I thought I would recommend some personal finance blogs I follow and have added to my blogroll.  These are blogs I find actively updated (at least 3 times per week) and base their content and financial decisions upon Biblical financial principles. 

Check them out when you get a chance and subscribe to them via Twitter or RSS.  If you know of others, or would like to provide your own blog, please let me know in the comments.

• Redeeming Riches
• Debt Free Adventure
• Christian PF
• Borrow from None
• Money Help for Christians
• Bible Money Matters

For those who don’t an envelopes budget is a simple for of spending management in which cash envelopes are created for typical spending categories.  For example, after receiving your paycheck, cash would be deposited into the food envelope.  As you purchase food or grocery store items, you use cash from the envelope.  If the cash is used up before the end of the month or before the next paycheck, you withdrawal cash from other envelopes and avoid the use of credit cards.

The Mvelopes software essentially does the same thing by allowing you to create online envelopes and automatically or manually fund them with your paycheck after it’s deposited.  Each electronic transaction deducts from the envelope based on how the transaction is categorized by the user.

Overall, the software provides some nice features and advantages that enable you to keep a close eye on spending while at the same time, taking advantage of under spent areas by reallocating the cash.

Mvelopes Pros:

Envelope Budgeting:

I think the concept of online envelope budgeting is an excellent idea.  A set of online envelopes can easily divide your checking account into different spending categories.

With envelopes, you only need one checking account.  Some people use 2 or 3 checking accounts to separate expenses areas.  Well, this is no longer needed with the use of the virtual envelopes.

Browser-based software:

I like that Mvelopes has taken advantage of web-based technology.  There is no need to download or upgrade the software.  Traditional software requires purchasing yearly upgrades and this is becoming more and more a thing of the past.

Support:  While there is a learning curve, the support forums seem to be regularly visited and updated by users.  This is always important when starting off on a new software package and needing assistance.  There is also live chat, user guides and online tutorials that help.

Mvelopes Features

Here are the core features I’ve found to be available with Mvelopes.

Budgeting:

• Create a budget or spending plan using different spending categories.
• Track personal expenses against categories to see how much money is remaining for categories.
• Split transactions to multiple categories.  Some transactions, i.e., Wal-Mart receipts, may require splitting amounts between multiple categories.

Banking:

• Automatic download of account, balances and transactions from financial institutions.
• Reconcile manually entered transactions with transactions automatically downloaded from financial institutions.

Bill Pay:

• Pay bills from any of your accounts with online bill pay feature.  The feature automatically deducts balances from envelopes.

Debt Management:

• Set up a debt plan or pay off schedule to get out of debt.

Report Highlights:

• Cash flow report shows monthly spending in and out of the account by spending category.
• View and print a monthly budget.

Net Worth Monitoring:

• Track your net work by measuring assets against liabilities.  This is a nice online feature to see where you are today in order to better determine where you need to go.

Mobility:

• Use software on a mobile device such as a Blackberry or iPhone to use features such as viewing envelope balances and creating transactions.

Mvelopes Cons

• The online envelope concept can take some getting used to.  There is a learning curve; however, it can be quickly overcome with the support tools and tutorials. 
• There is a cost to using Mvelopes where some products are now free on the web.  The cheapest option is $7.90 per month and you are charged a lump sum payment of $189.60 every other year.  A monthly subscription costs $13.20.

Future Enhancement Opportunities for Mvelopes:

Note:  I didn’t come across these features, but if you know they are available, please share in the comments.

• Leverage across users, such as showing comparisons between prices when items were purchased at the same location.
• Expense savings opportunities.  Mvelopes doesn’t provide expense savings advice or information related to spending habits. 
• It would be nice to program alerts based on rules, i.e., alert me when an envelope reaches a certain balance

Should You Use Mvelopes Personal?

I think the return on investment is there with Mvelopes.  Personal finance software should help drive better money management processes or support the processes you have in place today.

I think there is a lot of flexibility available in how you use the software, i.e., set up your spending plan.  It’s a tool that can remove a lot of the time associated with handling bank transactions and measuring expenditures against your budget.  It drives good money management practices.

The reporting allows you to get the information out of the system in such a way that you can make better strategic money management decisions.  As long as the data you enter is good, the reporting capabilities exist.

Mvelopes has a 14 day free trial.  I recommend signing up for the free trial to create test envelopes and transactions to better understand how the software works and to make sure it’s a fit for you.

Useful Links

• Learn about Mvelopes security
• I recently wrote a guest post at Christian PF about 4 notable features of Mvelopes Personal.  This is a good source for more in-depth information about some of the functionality.

With the plethora of Web 2.0 technology, people can now readily find new avenues to help them get on the path to financial freedom and learn about and thrive in personal finance.

What is Web 2.0?  If you Google “Web 2.0” the first result is a definition provided by Wikipedia.

“Web 2.0” refers to the second generation of web development and web design that facilitates information sharing, interoperability, user-centered design and collaboration on the World Wide Web. The advent of Web 2.0 led to the development and evolution of web-based communities, hosted services, and web applications. Examples include social-networking sites, video-sharing sites, wikis, blogs, mashups and folksonomies.

The key words to pay attention to in this definition are:  information sharing, collaboration and communities.  Web 2.0 technologies bring people together on technology platforms in which they can share information about topics of mutual interest, collaborate on ideas or problem solving, and join groups of like minded people in order to participate in discussions.

So where does Web 2.0 and personal finance intersect?  Probably one of the most commonly discussed topics is with transactional based personal finance software applications for budgeting, bill paying etc. Yes, there are many Web 2.0 personal finance software services emerging, but that’s not the purpose of this article.  Rather, I’d like to point out the value new personal finance information and collaboration tools bring to people interested in and needing help in the area personal finance.

In other words, I’m talking about the online coaching and counsel one can receive through these tools.  In the early beginnings of this blog, One Money Design, my perspective was greatly broadened to see how information sharing and coaching is taking place within many common Web 2.0 services such as blogging, tweeting (via Twitter), Really Simple Syndication feeds (RSS) podcasting and more.

I’m not suggesting technology has replaced the job of the financial counselor who can get into the details of one’s financial situation and help dissect problems and provide sound counsel, but these new tools simply enhance the learning experience and help people become much more financially astute.

Up until Web 2.0, there were a few ways to seek guidance in making personal finance decisions.  For instance, if you needed help to determine which debt to pay first or whether or not you should pay cash for a car or finance a new one you might have  considered the following options:

• Talk to your wife’s best friend’s husband who just had to make the same decision.
• Seek the advice of a trained financial counselor.
• Purchase and read a personal finance book or magazine.
• Look at a content based personal finance website.

Today, Web 2.0 tools offer more options.  What are these technologies and which ones am I leveraging today?  To get started, I’ve provided a brief overview for the web 2.0 beginner for just a few of the well known tools.

Personal Finance Blogs

A blog in basic terms is a weblog of content, ideas and opinions of the blogger.  In my mind there are two key benefits to blogs such as One Money Design.

First, there is the content.  You can find content on a blog related to personal finance from the experience of family CFO’s, counselors, financial planners and more.  Most of the popular personal finance gurus such as Dave Ramsey have their own blog.

Blogs can be great resource for learning.  They can provide a wide variety of personal finance information and content that can help you accelerate your journey to financial freedom.

The second great thing about blogs and possibly the most powerful is the commenting features.  Commenting brings people together and creates the discussion and community aspect of blogging.  The comments in posts are discussions readers and the blogger can have with each other related to the subject matter of the posts.  Many people are getting sound financial advice from these discussions that can help them get answers to their questions and get beyond their obstacles.

You do have to be careful and be a good judge of the content because sometimes, as with any web content, it might be inaccurate.  However, I think the best way to minimize this risk, in my opinion, is to find a Biblically based personal finance blog, such as One Money Design and also by following multiple bloggers.  I think following more than 10 can be difficult, but not impossible, especially with this next tool I’m about to discuss.

Personal Finance Really Simple Syndication (RSS)

If I’m going to mention blogs as a great Web 2.0 tool, I need to mention Really Simple Syndication (RSS) which is actually really simple!  Think about all of these content sources on the internet today.  There are millions.  I just did a Google search on “personal finance” and over 99,000,000 results are produced.

RSS allows you to bring many favorite sources of content together into one platform for viewing.  You can quickly catch the headlines or see the latest posts from your favorite bloggers.  Check out a portion of my Google home page that includes several bloggers I’ve come to follow and submit guest posts.

How do you get an RSS feed?  Most blog sites will have a way for you to subscribe and add the feed to your Google or Yahoo home page.  Look for something similar to the below RSS subscribe link for One Money Design.  The icon is universal for RSS feeds.

Subscribe to One Money Design via RSS

Personal Finance Podcasts

Podcasts are a simply a digital media file which can be played back on a mobile device or computer.  They are a great way to listen to your favorite personal finance show based on your own time schedule.

I currently listen to two popular podcasts that have provided great counsel for me.  I recommend downloading and listening to both the Dave Ramsey Show and Money Life by Crown Financial Ministries.

Personal Finance Tweeting on Twitter

You may have heard of Twitter where people are constantly updating their followers about what they’re doing in everyday life.  I honestly hadn’t gotten into tweeting and following others on Twitter until I started One Money Design.  What I found out was that many personal finance bloggers are also tweeting about personal finance.

Most of us bloggers are spending time throughout the week in the blogging community reading what others have to say about personal finance and joining in on the conversations.  When bloggers come across articles that stand out, or important news, you’ll usually see a tweet about it.  The point is that most bloggers provide a way to subscribe and follow them via Twitter on their blog home page.

Twitter can be an excellent way to get top content delivered to you via a tweet.  It’s kind of like a daily magazine subscription.

Personal Finance Buzz

You may have heard about Digg which is a web 2.0 tool you can use to vote or Digg content you read on the internet.  Digg has content from A to Z.  The most popular content on the internet is at the top of the list for each category.

A great alternative to Digg that is focused solely on personal finance is PF Buzz.   Most personal finance bloggers I’ve come across are posting their best content on PF Buzz for others to read about and “buzz” if liked.  PF Buzz is a great source to get the latest and greatest content on personal finance.  It also allows you to get a good flavor of the different styles of the personal finance bloggers.

Need an answer to a question or want to learn more about personal finance?  You now can think about these additional avenues to find the answer.  Better yet, consider how you may be able to help others through your own experience by commenting after reading your next blog article.

What are some of the other Web 2.0 technolgies and tools you’ve found to be helfpul in learning about and managing your personal finances?

I know that as a personal finance software user, there are certain features I can’t live without.  They allow me to do my job as a family CFO (Chief Financial Officer) more efficiently (I’m all about saving time) and effectively.  For example, such features help provide the precision needed to crunch the numbers for 12 months of spending in one area of the family budget.

What are these features?  What makes them so important to performing my work as a family CFO?  I’ve started a list of the features we typically can’t live without as well as the nice to have’s.  These are the features that could be used to measure the value of any personal finance software service or package before purchasing or signing up.

So, where am I going?  I’m going to use a baseline list to explore different personal finance software on the market.  The findings will be presented in my posts under the personal finance software category from time to time.  But first…

Here’s the initial list of must have features (and some nice to have’s).

Budgeting:

• Can create a budget or spending plan with categories.
• Can track expenses against categories.
• Can split transactions to multiple categories.

Banking:

• Download accounts, balances and transactions from financial institutions.
• Ability to reconcile manually entered transactions with transactions downloaded from financial institution.

Bill Pay:

• Pay bills from any account.

Debt Management:

• Set up a debt plan or pay off schedule.
• Download accounts, balances and transactions from financial institutions.

Reports:

• Cash flow report.
• Ability to view and print a monthly budget.

Social Networking:

• Ability to network with other users of the software and learn from their spending decisions.
• Ability to see spending comparisions with other users across locations.

Savings:

• Mechanism or ability to show savings based on transactions for financial institutions being used, i.e., lower rate on credit cards, etc.

Investing:

• Provides features for reviewing individual investments and performance.
• Provides capability to plan for the future, i.e., retirement calculator.

Alerts:

• Alerted when thresholds have been or are close to being met.

Mobility:

• Ability to use software on a mobile device such as a Blackberry or iPhone.

Other:

• Should be relatively easy to set up and use for all software skill levels.
• Support:  users forums or a customer service option must be available.
• Provides a way to back up and store data.

And what about you?  If you lost your computer or access to the internet today would you still be able to manage your finances?   Probably, but not without calling your bank to get your current balance, entering it into a new checkbook register (after you had to go pick one up at the bank), writing out your monthly budget and then begin to track your expenses in your spending notebook.

Relax!  Go ahead and check your surge protector, make sure your internet service provider payments are current and back up your data.  Then…

What features would you like to see on this list that might be missing?  Which features make the difference for you or would be ideal to have in your personal finance sofware solution?

I recently came across a FREE online tool called DebtGoal which does most of the work for you. It enables you to set up a debt plan and manage to a consistent payment schedule.

As with a carpenter, you have the right tools in your belt to manage wisely. Upon first look, DebtGoal appears to be one of those essential tools that will help you eliminate debt.

Here’s what DebtGoal says about having a plan:

Research shows that if you don’t have a well-defined plan for reducing your debt, you’re likely to simply make the minimum payments suggested by your financial institution. You may make additional payments from time to time, but it’s often just easier to just pay the minimums. However following a plan instead of making minimum payments will dramatically reduce your interest costs and the time you spend in debt.

After experimenting with DebtGoal I’m convinced this is a tool that can help someone get a plan together and work their way out of debt!

I recently took the opportunity to explore this tool and below are some of the features that caught my attention.

DebtGoal features

Manually add or automatically add accounts

You can either download your account information or transactions from the financial institution or add them yourself. I chose the manual route to see how quick it was to add a debt and it didn’t take any time at all. The automated route would be nice to save you the time from entering all of your debt information and finding the paperwork necessary for this task.

Adjust your monthly commitment with a slider bar

I really like this feature. DebtGoal shows the minimum payment, but you can use a slide bar to increase the amount you plan to pay over the minimum. DebtGoal recalculates your Debt Free Goal Date based on the new commitment. It gets exciting to see the Debt Free Goal Date and motivating to see the time shorten by committing more to your payment.

DebtGoal decides which loan your commitment will be applied

The logic DebtGoal uses is to pay the highest interest debt first. I’m neither for nor against this approach. In fact, I typically recommend people to pick the first two lowest balance loans and pay them off first (if they can do it in relatively short time) and then tackle their loans by way of highest interest rate first. I recommend this approach because paying off a couple of loans builds momentum and confidence.

View future balances

This is a cool feature in that you can see your total future debt balance by month. Nice to see a visual bar chart of your balance decreasing the further out you get in your plan.

Add a payment or automatically download

As with setting up your accounts, you can add a payment manually or set it up to download from your financial institution. You may want to auto download to save time.

View payment schedule

The payment schedule breaks the plan down into more detail. With the payment schedule you can see the payment amount each month, your calculated principal balance, interest paid and remaining balance.

Accelerator actions provide more options

The accelerator actions are recommended actions you can take outside of your debt plan. By following these actions you can modify your debt plan with a one – time payment or increase your monthly payment. One example of an action is negotiating credit card interest rates. Note: I didn’t experiment with these too much, but it appears DebtGoal will provide recommended steps to take associated with each action.

As I mentioned, the first step in getting out of debt is getting organized. This is the hardest part for most people. As a suggestion, set aside a few hours this week to set up DebtGoal and let it do the rest as far as keeping your payment schedule organized. You can finally check off your money management list that you have a plan to get out of debt. Oh, don’t forget to circle the day on your calendar in which you’ll be living debt free!

Have you had any experience with DebtGoal?  Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

You may be visiting for the first time today.  If so, welcome to One Money Design!  As you might read on the about page, I believe there is financial hope for people. I have a passion to see people prosper, become debt free, and experience financial freedom.  As a Crown Money Map Coach and a blogger, I created this website to further my reach in helping people manage money wisely for everyday living.

While you’re here consider singing up for the newsletter or RSS feed (in the sidebar menu). 

Here is a list of upcoming posts (in no specific order)

• Money Map and Baby Step Comparison – see the new series here.
• DebtGoal Helps Eliminate Debt
• Mvelopes vs. Mint series
• Taking Care to Avoid Bankruptcy
• Living from Heaven Backwards – Update – This will be a guest post on Bible Money Matters August 7th.