Quicken: Budget & Track Money

I’ve never been good at budgeting. In fact I pushed myself to make more and more money in my career so that I didn’t have to learn to budget. Then I realized my wellbeing isn’t for sale and changed to a job that pays a reasonable amount for a normal amount of hours. At that point I had multiple properties, mortgages, auto loans, rental income….. but I had NO IDEA how to manage my money on a daily basis. I did a TON of research on apps and websites that could help me and landed on Simplifi. I’m so glad I did. It’s made it so easy to see what’s coming in and what’s going out, set budgets for regular categories, and savings goals for large expenses. I love that almost every single company that I have accounts with can automatically sync- credit cards, bank accounts, mortgages, auto loans, retirement accounts, brokerage accounts, even utility accounts! I am not overstating things when I say that Simplifi gives me the peace of mind I need to not stress about money. (It’s worth noting nobody is paying me to say this, though if they wanted to I’d happily take it 😆). Just do it. Spend the money and give yourself some much needed control over your financial life.

The latest update has been driving me nuts. To hide an item from reports or spending plan you have to scroll around until you find the right arrow to expand, previously the options were just showing. But what’s really leaning of the verge of being unusable is no longer removing items in the spending plan that you exclude. Based on their FAQs this is intentional but why?! It’s just noise, I don’t want to see what I’ve chosen to ignore. I get wanting to make it easier to find excluded items to change but there is no options to hide them (like there is in income, just do that in the spending plan too!) and it doesn’t group it at the bottom which would at least get them out of the way. Instead they are just hanging out there to have to scroll through and confuse you (the little gray eyeball is there but I still want to filter out). Really makes it way less usable. Other things- connections to banks don’t consistently work, it’s missing some flexibility like splitting an item and ignoring only part of this split. And you have to open and close the app at least twice for it to fully (very slowly) update, and I know when it’s worked because I’ll get batched email notifications that are obviously playing catch-up. Overall it’s a pretty good app but those little things start to add up and make it frustrating to use. I will continue to use it but I don’t recommend it to other people, fwiw

I love this app. I am not a zero-based budgeter at this phase in my life, and that’s why this app is so stellar. It allows you to prioritize the things you need, prepare for certain things that may come up in the month and then still have a lump sum leftover that’s flexible for whatever your life turns out to be that month. It’s just so frustrating to use, and I’m holding out hope the developers will really put in the elbow grease to make it run smoothly. Debt payments on cards that are carrying balances (on a debt payoff journey) are not intuitive to the app, you have to work against it to make sure they don’t just count it as a transfer and not money “lost” to a debt balance. Your current balance seems to never reflect what’s actually reflecting in your bank statement, and I can’t for the life of me figure out why this is. It always seems like my available to spend does not line up at the end of the month with how much money I still have in my account. I feel like I am constantly making workarounds to get the best accuracy possible. Truthfully, this review should probably be a 3 star but I just love the concept of the app and it’s function to see the future, make “buckets” and not force you to do zero-based budgeting like so many others. Also, it’s account integration is heads and shoulders above a lot of other apps I’ve used - it tracks all kinds of accounts for you. I really hope it gets improved soon!