Best App for Serious Budget Planning with a Highly Uncertain Future

Updated: 10/9/15

Overall: When you know the envelope or bucket method of budget planning, MoneyWell is perhaps the best app to use. Unfortunately, it has a cumbersome, increasingly outdated UI, and development on it has been nearly dead for at least two years.

Good: Well-designed to handle the bucket (envelope) method for budget planning.
Bad: Many input methods are clumsy and outdated.
Ugly: Nearly non-existent developer support and a recent cancellation of the User Forums will leave you anxious.

You have mostly two methods to handle personal finances. You can track incomes, expenses, and account balances using an accounting method. Alternatively, you can plan budgets using a bucket (or envelope) method. When you are unfamiliar with the latter approach and/or you are certain that you want to track your bank, investment, and retirement balances very closely, you need to look elsewhere.

MoneyWell nicely implements the bucket paradigm for budget planning. It is Mac-centric, not Java-based. The content presentation is intuitive for a layman, not designed to invoke an accountant ledger.

Be prepared for frustration with ineffective UI designs and inputs. For example, to generate a future spending plan based on a previous cash flow, you must click each bucket you have one at a time. The design worked nicely some 5 years ago, and it is frozen since then. Ownership changed hands over a year ago, and the new developer/owner has been essentially an absentee landlord, making only essential changes. You might say he is keeping an old horse running on the new MacOS, and that is about it. The User Forums have also been cancelled recently.

I give MoneyWell 5 stars for principle, and then I deduct 4 stars for increasingly outdated design and lack of reliable developer support. This app should be stamped Buyer Beware in bold bright letters!

DrJJWMac about MoneyWell