Wednesday, April 16, 2008

Budgeting: Review of Mvelopes


OK. I'm pretty in love with this program/service/whatever it is. Maybe I'll ask my mom for an early Christmas present?

The Good:

  • Easy to set up and link accounts. I had no problems linking my checking and savings accounts.
  • Great Tech support. I did have a bit of trouble linking my credit card, but Mvelopes tech. support helped me right away. They even have live chat.
  • Effortless to track expenses! When I make any purchases with my debit or credit card, they are posted into my Mvelopes account, and I just click and drag them to the appropriate category (groceries, medical, education, etc.). It's always a pain for me to print out bank/credit card statements, and separate all of the entries into different columns and add them up with a calculator. Mvelopes saves me LOTS of time, and I can assess how we're doing on our budget any given day.
The Bad:
  • If you don't already have a budget/spending plan, it will still be useful for you, but it may take a few months of spending to figure out what your spending habits are.
  • It takes awhile to log in and refresh my accounts, especially with Mozilla. I've had much better luck with Explorer.
  • Mvelopes makes me a little too obsessed with the budget. I need to limit myself the number of times to check it in a week! : )

3 comments:

femputer said...

wow, that looks and sounds really useful. Especially dragging and dropping things. Do you think it's worth the price?

Lauren said...

yeah, if you buy one year's subscription, it works out to not quite $11.00/month...pretty reasonable.

Tizzalicious said...

It does sound useful!