The Right Program for Financial Planning

It’s January. Holiday bills will show up any day. Chances are you don’t think you’ve got any money to worry about managing now.

But if you’ve ever thought about computerizing your personal finances, now is the best time to start because you’ll be able to enter data gradually as it accumulates through the year. The later in the year you start, the larger the backlog of checks, receipts and portfolio transactions you’ll have to grapple with all at once.

A perennial software favorite for personal financial management has been Andrew Tobias’ Managing Your Money, which has been around since 1984.

Published by MECA Ventures Inc. of Westport, Conn., for $220, the sixth edition of Managing Your Money has just been released with a host of new features.

The program has always been geared toward tracking finances, with everything from managing your checkbook to budgeting to following your investment portfolio.

Now it adds built-in links to an electronic check-writing service called Check Free. It also keeps a record of all the vital information that your family would need in case you were incapacitated or died. (There is even a provision for you to write your own obituary, if you are so inclined.) And it also automatically links to a companion tax preparation program called Tax Cut, $50, that MECA offers.

Another companion program, Managing the Market, $80, is also available. Through it your computer can call the Dow Jones Information Service and automatically update your portfolio with the latest stock and bond prices.

Managing Your Money is organized into nine “chapters,” each reached by a single keystroke from a main selection menu. In addition to a utilities chapter for system housekeeping chores, the sections include: a reminder pad for scheduling appointments; budget and checkbook, the main workhorse of the program; income tax estimator; insurance and estate planning; financial calculator; portfolio manager; net worth, and card file.

Although not listed on the menu, there is a word processor built in that can be used along with any other operation. With it you can write letters or reports up to about 5,000 words long and you can add explanatory notes to any transaction record you desire.

With the combination of the word processor, the reminder pad and the card file to store name and address lists and other important lists, it is possible that some computer users could get along with Managing Your Money as their only application program.

What a computer adds to any money management task is a degree of automation. Managing Your Money achieves that goal by carrying data you enter one place in the program automatically over to all other places it is needed.

For example, if you can use the program’s loan calculator, which can compute payments for a wide variety of loans, it can automatically add the payments to your budget and checking accounts with proper allocations for principal and interest.

Similarly, any transactions you record while in the portfolio management section will be carried over to other relevant chapters, such as the budget and income tax estimating, net worth statment and even insurance and estate planning.

The checkbook chapter allows you to set up a list of automatic transactions that can be run in whole or in part whenever you want. If you use the program to print your checks for you (with check forms you order to match your account number), you can even control the order in which the checks will be printed to match the order in which you are going through your bills. It can help you get the right check in the right envelope.

The manual, written by Andrew Tobias, the financial expert who designed what the program should do and gave it his name, is one of the best software manuals around. Its conversational style is easy to read, and Tobias has a knack for knowing when users need to know something and, better yet, anticipate the mistakes that they will make and issue warnings.

Unfortunately, the technical folks who turned Tobias’ ideas into a software program are not so graceful. While Managing Your Money is jammed with many useful features, it suffers from maintaining a 1984-era look and feel, which was the Stone Age of personal computing.

Keyboard assignments are not always consistent, such as sometimes using the F3 key to add an entry when most of the time it acts as a delete key. The Esc (Escape) key is used both to call up help screens and then exit them. Most PC-compatible software designers long ago reserved the Esc key for backing up through their program’s command choices.

Deleting the sample data sprinkled throughout the program is tedious and must be done section by section. If you miss any, it is likely to show up weeks or months later like a time bomb within your own work.

Compared to the simple elegance of Quicken, a program that manages checking accounts and keeps track of a budget, Managing Your Money is more confusing and more difficult to use, although it also does much more.

I don’t claim to be the world’s swiftest software student, but it took me three frustrating tries before I could program Managing Your Money to account for my paycheck in the manner prescribed in Tobias’ book. I kept getting myself into a loop of self-canceling activities, which is easy to do.

There is a learning curve to successfully using Managing Your Money, and you’ll have to decide whether you want to use its considerable powers fully enough and often enough to make it worth the effort.

If all you really want to do is keep track of your expenses and get a printed report at year-end to take to your tax accountant, you might be happier with Quicken, which does that quite easily.

But if you really do want to compute your own loan amortizations and calculate the financial differences between leasing or buying a Mercedes and you’ve got a fat and active stock portfolio to look after, then Managing Your Money is worth trying.

ANDREW TOBIAS’ MANAGING YOUR MONEY

A full-featured financial planning and checkbook management program.

Features: A comprehensive program covering virtually every aspect of financial management, from scheduling your time to writing checks to estate planning to setting up college funds to estimating your income tax. You can also write all your correspondence and, with optional software, link to stock market data and prepare your income tax return.

Requirements: IBM PC or compatible with at least 256 kilobytes of memory and one floppy disk drive. More memory and a hard disk enhance performance.

Publisher: MECA Ventures Inc., 327 Riverside Ave., Westport, Conn. 06880. Phone: (203) 222-9150.