Several very good personal money management software programs are available for very little money. I have been using Quicken for years and it has served me very well, indeed. This short hub is my attempt to show you why I would never be without some kind of money management software on my computer. I will also share a note of security with you.

In my experience there are two ways in which your computer will greatly ease your life and add to your feeling of financial security. One way is the use of your bank's on-line services and the other is the use of a program such as Quicken or Microsoft Money. Either one will do the same job for most people. Generally, on-line banking services are free and neither Quicken nor Money costs more than $25.00. I use both forms (on-line and Quicken) because each one compliments the other.

An on-line service of your bank is a great way to track all your purchases. It is especially good for people like me who make liberal use of a debit card. It provides dates and vendors for all your purchases. Most items like debit card purchases appear on your bank statement the same day or soon thereafter. You will always know what the bank sees happening on your account whether the action is a credit or a debit. Their math is absolutely perfect and, if a balance seems odd, you can always see what they used to arrive at that total. As a bonus, you can easily set up your on-line account to allow you to pay most of your bills without ever writing checks or looking for a stamp. In our case, we travel a great deal and we have no trouble at all keeping our bills paid on time because we do not have to rely upon the U. S. Mail to catch us and to deliver checks. It works great!

However, the Quicken serves several purposes left unfulfilled by the bank. The most important feature of our Quicken is that, when kept up-to-date, it is also a check register and shows checks I have written which have not yet hit the bank. If the bank has not seen the check it cannot show it on the on-line site but the money is just as well spent anyway. So, my Quicken is more timely than the bank service. Still, I can reconcile my Quicken - like a check book - daily if I wish with the bank on-line statement. As a result, I always know exactly how much money I have - or don't have. Quicken also gives me another huge service: I can assign categories to payments and write myself simple and quick reports whenever I feel like it. Thus I know how much I spend on gasoline. Not only that, but, since I assign a charity code to each charitable payment, doing taxes at the end of the year is greatly simplified by a report that Quicken will generate for me. Microsoft Money will do the same thing. It's great! Oh, yeah - Quicken has never made a math error with totals. I cannot claim that honor for myself. It is, however, very important that when you set up the software, you pay careful attention to the way in which you establish accounts and spending categories. But it's all pretty intuitive.

A note regarding security: When setting up user name and password with the bank site, never use your real name as user and never use your social security number as a password. Pick a user you will remember such as "hounddog" and write a password that combines both numbers and letters. For example, pineapple can be coded as 91n32ppl3. Think about it for a while. Also, I do not back up my Quicken onto my hard drive. I use a memory stick which also has a lot of personal items on it. I then remove the stick from the computer when I am finished with my financial work for that session. It cannot be hacked when it is sitting on the other side of the room.

So, you see, by combining the bank's on-line service with my copy of Quicken I have excellent control of our money from anywhere in the country.

So, why is it that there seems to be so little money to go around? Don't you get points for being careful and well-intentioned?