<p>Mac Users - what program do you use to track your finances? I really don’t need anything sophisticated, like tracking investments or amortizing mortgages, I just want to track our spending and be able to pull various reports to look at categories.</p>
<p>I currently use Quicken 2007 for Mac, which is fine for my use, although of course it is can’t hold a candle to the PC version of Quicken. However, if I want to upgrade to Lion, I can no longer use Quicken for Mac.</p>
<p>I have read a bunch of articles in Mac magazines etc and am still confused. One recommended Mint.com, which looks great for everything except pulling reports! What is the sense of categorizing everything if you can’t go back and see where you spent things?</p>
<p>I will check out iBank too, I don’t know much about that. I have read that many Mac users run parallels so they can use the PC version of Quicken.</p>
<p>Intuit is putting out a patch Quicken Mac 2007 in Q1 that will enable it to run under Lion. If you can wait that might be your best bet. </p>
<p>My Quicken file goes back 10+ years. I’ve tried converting it to other SW and it does not work. So I run VMWare Fusion on my Mac and use it to run Windows 7 in a window. PC version of Quicken then runs perfectly. </p>
<p>Quicken is the only piece of PC software I have left.</p>
If I were you, I would hold on to SL for a while (till all critical bugs are fixed), unless you have to have the latest AND your MAC hardware is very high-end. In the modern world, the early adopters tend to get burned (unless you are one of those modern computer users who enjoy spending hours if not days/weeks hunting down temporary fixes or keeping upgrading your software – This not ony applies to Apple’s products, but also applies to most others.)</p>
<p>DS did have a Macbook Pro with Lion. If he had a choice, he would rather keep using SL at least for a while.</p>
<p>Regarding your main question about financial software, I do not have a clue.</p>
<p>Lion is the buggiest version of Mac OS X that I have seen. I do not plan to upgrade my laptop from Snow Leopard until the quality level improves. They did a particularly poor job in support for older systems (my system is four years old) with nVidia graphics.</p>
<p>^ I heard some third-party hardware vendors (e.g., audio gears, printers) might have some troubles in keeping up with Lion. Many early adopters got burned for at least a month or so.</p>
<p>DS has the first version of Apogee Duet (which is a portable Firewire audio interface device). Even though Apogee updated the driver and application, I am not sure whether it is all functional. My guess is most basic functions should work. We appreciate that Apogee is willing to continue to support the older version of Duet. (The current version is the second version.)</p>
<p>For printers, my guess is that, if the printer supports the “old-and-trustworthy” CUPS on Mac OS X v10.7, it is probably safe to assume it may continue to work. Am I right? I am not very sure about all the newer technology like airprint, ePrint/eFax on Lion (or on any other Max OS X version) and how easy to set it up (and on which printer.)</p>
<p>I use iBank with Lion. I had used Quicken for 15 years and I was able to import data into iBank. It wasn’t a perfect import, but after some effort, I’m have what I want. iBank is different than Quicken and takes some getting use to. But I am satisfied with it. I will not go back to Quicken with an update.</p>
<p>I don’t want to upgrade to Lion, but my husband does :). He thinks we’ll need to do that to support all the MobileMe things now that MobileMe is going away, like iCal, Address Book, etc. </p>
<p>He is concerned that soon some of our other software may not run unless we use Lion. That about exhausts my knowledge of OS!</p>
<p>YNAB (You Need A Budget). Incredibly powerful tool for getting control of your spending. Runs on Macs and Windows, and there are iPhone and Droid apps as well. Eye-openingly brilliant approach, imo. They give you a free five week trial, and the folks there are incredibly responsive if you have questions. I wish I’d found it five (or even ten) years ago. It runs by four rules:
Give every dollar a job. (The corollary being that each dollar gets only one job!)
Save for a Rainy Day. (And it was all those “lumpy” expenses like annual insurance payments or RE taxes that kept throwing us off.)
Roll with the punches. (Life happens. But when your budget needs to handle that unexpected $1200 transmission job, you need to think through what categories you’re going to reduce spending in, or whether that money is going to come from savings, or what other source.)
Stop living paycheck to paycheck. (Another way is to say use last month’s income for this month’s expenses…and I think most people initially react by saying there is no possible way to do that. The YNAB folks show you how to get there over time. But really, it makes budgeting so much easier. </p>
<p>I can’t think of a piece of software more valuable to me. It doesn’t manage my investments. It isn’t connected to tax preparation software. But it does a far, far better job of helping me manage my budget than anything else I’ve ever used. I’ve now got sinking funds set up for all sorts of annual expenses (Christmas, property taxes, …) and I no longer wonder where money is going. </p>
<p>[url=<a href=“http://www.ynab.com%5DPersonal”>http://www.ynab.com]Personal</a> Budget Software - Finance Software for Windows & Mac<a href=“And%20no,%20I%20don’t%20receive%20a%20commission.”>/url</a></p>
<p>That looks very nice. What is the support policy on it?</p>
<p>In general, I just look at statements from time to time and our finances are generally on autopilot. If something looks out of place, then I investigate it. I keep gross amounts on assets and liabilities (we haven’t really had any of these for a long time) in a spreadsheet.</p>
<p>I don’t know whether or not I want more control and detail but it would be interesting to take a look.</p>