Personal Finance Programs

[Dakota02]

Hi all, I am new here.

We have been looking for a personal finance program that we can load on our computer (free or pay for it, it doesn't matter). What we want or automatic updates to the program from our bank account, automatic sorting of most items like gas and food etc. The big one is that on the bar graphs of each spending area we want there to be a budget line and a different section on that bar for regular spending and emergency spending.

For example if we budgeted $300 for gas and our normal monthly expense is $250 (which leaves $50 for emergency amount) and we have an emergency pull out of $100 that would come out of the emergency section of $50 and show that we are potentially $50 over budget. We don't like if it comes out of the regular budget and we may be over budget at the end of the month. But the other way allows us to scale back and correct the overage.

We were looking at mint.com but I don't know if they have this feature, does anyone know or can suggest a program that does?

Thanks
Bill

[ktmarvels]

Mint.com does most of that. However, they don't technically have the feature you are looking for. A way to get around it is either making that "emergency fund" be in your "uncategoried" or "everything else" categories so for the entire month you may not be overbudget, but for the individual line item, you will be. You also may even be able to create a budget line for emergency, however I think that loses it's effectiveness because if you label it emergency you don't know if you overspent on gas or food or... I've been using mint for a long time, and while there are some things I wish they'd improve upon, on the whole it has worked out very well for us.