There are a lot of programs in the market claiming to be the top notch program, able to solve all your financial problems in a blink and even change a negative bank balance into a positive one. Let me tell you this, it is not done by smoke and mirrors, but these home personal finance software programs have numerous features that can help you as long as you know what you want the program to do for you.
The top of the list is the “quicken starter edition 2008” program, it is awarded first place for home personal finance software in 2008, let us browse through it quickly:
1. General rating: it gets full marks for being easy to install and to deal with, it also works under the most popular operating systems such as Windows 2000, XP and Vista but it is not able to work under Linux.
2. Features and options: you are able to manage your incoming and outgoing money from your account, even from your Pay Pal account, calculate the taxes and pay all your bills.
3. Quicken Starter Home Personal Finance software is fully integrated with Tax Turbo, so calculating your deductibles is now easier than before
4. Managing personal investments: this is the real down side in the Quicken Starter 2008 program as it is not able to manage your investments. And to be able to do so, you need to upgrade to Quicken Deluxe Edition which may contain many more options that you do not need to manage in a personal account. Also, you are not able to downgrade back to the starter version without loosing the data from the deluxe version.
However, when you look at our silver position winner you will find Microsoft Money Essentials 2008 offering you some great features with a lower price.
1. General features: it is user friendly home personal finance software which is very easy to deal with as most of Microsoft programs. But, it is only able to work under windows XP and Vista; it is not able to work under Windows 2000 or Linux.
2. The most important feature of the Microsoft Money Essentials 2008 is that it helps you with your investments. You are able to manage all of your investments online in a snap.
3. This home personal finance software falls short when you want to calculate your tax deductibles. It is only able to mark transactions as deductibles but it is not able to find out by itself what transactions are up to deduction.
4. This home personal finance software program will compensate the last drawback with its ability to find you the best loan plan through the “loan calculator feature.”
Finally there are more than these two products in the market, all of them are offering different features and options. So you need to think thoroughly and determine which features you are looking for in your home personal finance software before you make your purchase.