Tuesday, March 6, 2007

Freeware alert: Manage your finances with Money Manager Ex

Do you have a hard time making the ends meet? Do you swipe that damn credit card into that 'money-making' machine to pay the minimum balances for another card? Do you have a hard time sleeping at night? If so, you are in trouble! A BIG trouble! There are a few things that money can't buy but for everything else there is your credit card! Hope you can remember the popular ad which sounds somewhat like that, but do you really trust those words now? I guess, not! Right? An average American carries a credit card debt of about $8000 (on top of other debts like car and home mortgage).

If you have a high debt you can either go bankrupt like a sinking boat or you can get a grip on your life and get yourself out of the quagmire. The first step of course is to figure out where you are spending and how you are spending and then to decide how to cut your coat according to your pocket! You can sit down and figure these things using the traditional pen-and-paper method or you can buy money-managing softwares (not free) like Microsoft Money or Quicken. Will you want to spend some more money on those when you have very little left? Some will say that it's worth the investment. But why, when you can get free stuff like Money Manager Ex? It has almost all the features (and yet very light) and it's all you need to track your expenses and make a budget:

Money Manager is a personal finance software. It primarily helps organize one's finances and keeps track of where, when and how the money goes. It is also a tool to get a bird's eye view of your financial worth. The program supports checking accounts, savings and credit card accounts, as well as Fixed Deposit and Portfolio accounts. The Outlook-style interface provides an overview for all your accounts and total balance. You can transfer money between accounts, create custom categories to organize your income/expenses and more.

Money Manager Ex is a complete rewrite of the original .NET Money Manager. It is Cross Platform and can be ported to run on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. It has a very powerful and flexible open data storage using SQLite databases.

Money Manager has the following other editions available: Money Manager .NET, Money Manager Ex for Windows 9x/Me and Money Manager Ex for Linux.

It's pretty self-explanatory and you can make sense out of it just starting to use it. Good luck!

Link: via fileforum

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