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PERSONAL FINANCE MANAGEMENT GUIDE
Quick and easy strategies for getting control of your money. An all-you-need-to-know introduction to managing and making the most of your hard-earned money.
Recommended Books
I have read all of these books but from time to time I still browse some of its
pages when ever I forget the concepts being discussed. Reading these books
doesn't make you rich or solve your financial problems instantly but it pays to
know the theories first before the application. My personal favorites are
The Fair Tax Book: Saying Goodbye to the Income Tax and the IRS
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Recommended Softwares
If you want free software or you are using linux based operating systems, these are the alternatives.
Intuit Quicken and Microsoft Money are two popular Windows-based packages for personal financial management. GNU/Linux offers several similar applications -- most of them free software -- that can meet or exceed the capabilities of the proprietary programs. If you can adjust to a different interface, you might find you like one of them more than the better-known alternatives.
Moneydance
Reilly Technologies' Moneydance is the only proprietary program of the bunch. The license is restrictive in all the usual ways -- you can use Moneydance on only one computer, you can't use it for commercial purposes, and you can't modify it or give it out to anyone.
Despite being proprietary, Moneydance seems to be superior to the other financial tools I tested. It can import Quicken .QIF files, retrieve updated account information directly from bank Web sites that support the OFX protocol (there is a long list of participating banks, and if yours is not listed you can add yours via manual settings, or download data from your bank's Web site and import it manually into Moneydance), and it has an extensibility architecture that allows you to add extra program components. The default extension list includes tools for importing text files, predicting future balances, an online updater for Moneydance, Yahoo! stock quotes and currency exchange rates, a Python scripting interface, and a credit card payoff calculator. I didn't discover any other official extensions outside of the default list.
jGnash
GPL-licensed
jGnash is also written in Java, but doesn't have a cool installer program
like Moneydance has. To run the program, you have to use the
java -jar
command from a terminal, which is about as user-unfriendly as a program binary
can be.
The jGnash interface is minimalist, but still a cut above GnuCash's barren interface. Instead of a lot of fancy buttons, most of the functions in jGnash are executed through the menu system. jGnash has six possible GUI "look and feel" sets, and about two dozen graphical themes, but I found the defaults to be the most attractive. One big negative point about jGnash is its speed: it's extremely slow in its calculations, even with only a few simple entries of test data to work with. On a dual Opteron workstation with 4GB of RAM, it took about 15 seconds just to bring up a profit and loss calculation window after I selected it from the menu. I'd hate to see how long it takes with a year's worth of bank and credit card transaction data in it.
KMyMoney
KMyMoney is a free software program optionally included with KDE in some GNU/Linux distributions. It's much like Intuit Quicken in terms of its interface; even the forest green opening splash screen is reminiscent of Quicken.
Most of the same functionality is present in KMyMoney as in Quicken, except there is no ability to communicate directly with financial institutions, and it lacks .TXF export functionality. As far as file importing is concerned, Quicken .QIF and GnuCash data can be imported into the KMyMoney format. There is no ability to export to anything other than .QIF, however, so don't expect to come out with a PDF, PostScript, or plain text file.
If you are the esoteric type or you have been to neuro-linguistic programming seminars you can try this...BMV Quantum Subliminal CD: Money Management- Improve your Finances! Manage your Personal Finances Better! Personal Finance Financial Planning Success Mind Program with NLP, Brainwave Entrainment Technology and Ultrasonic Ultra-Silent Subliminal Programming.
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