Long-time Quicken & Simplifi user tries Monarch Money and returns home to Simplifi
So I'd been hearing a lot about Monarch Money lately so I thought I'd give the free trial an attempt to compare to my Simplifi experience. It should be noted that I've been using Simplifi for about a year(?) and had used Quicken for years prior to that. I tried Mint long ago when I was still using Quicken and found Mint severely lacking in features; so I stayed with Quicken back then.
I spent a few hours setting up my Monarch account to setup the budget (which was very standard and focused on 'by category' budgeting) and dashboard setup and such, but ultimately my trial was short-lived because one of my primary banks (for mortgage, most of my cash savings and big expense management) had connection issues with Monarch that couldn't be resolved even with help from customer service (though I will give them big kudos for very prompt responses to my help request). So ultimately, I ended my account there very quickly because of the connection issues. However, I was already leaning towards staying with Simplifi even before the major connection issues.
Here's the things I really like about Simplifi (and a few that could be even better):
- The Spending Plan
- I love the spending plan setup. When I used to use Quicken, I'd setup my categories into discretionary and non-discretionary buckets as a workaround to figure out how much I'd have left after all the "required" expenses are taken care of. Simplifi sets this up automatically when you assign recurring expenses as either Bills or Subscriptions. Debt payments/transfers and Savings are also lumped into this bucket in Spending Plan so it is really easy to see how much you've got left to work with for Planned expenses as well as your Other Expenses (aka all those big and little things you didn't plan to buy but did anyways).
- The sequential view of "Income after Bills & Saving → Planned spending → Other expenses → Available money after all that" is REALLY helpful to assign every dollar a job and to monitor for overspending. The detail view for Other Expenses is great for getting clarity on spending areas as well as for error checking (wrong categories or errors in recurring expense setup).
- Improvement idea: An annual view or just being able to jump to specific months/years might be nice for those of us doing a next year lookahead and needing to update specific recurring income/expense transactions - such as updating bonus income that only occurs one month).
- Institution connectivity
- I have had no issues with Simplifi staying connected to my institutions. Which is impressive because everything else I've ever tried has always had connection issues with one bank or another. So keep up the great connectivity! There's nothing worse than sitting down to budget only to have to spend next 30 minutes troubleshooting a connection issue.
- Watchlist
- LOVE the watchlist. If there is a spending area you are trying to cut back on or just trying to be more mindful in spending there, then the watchlist is your best friend. Love how the watchlists can be setup by Payee, Category (both major category and sub-categories) and Tags. Also like how you aren't required to set up a Target so you can focus on specific action watchlists with targets but can keep others active for quick monitoring purposes also.
- Has all the other basic features I want like Goals, reports for spending categories and totals over month/year as well as income/etc, Bills and Payments for Cash flow view and recurring expense calendar and lists.
- The only thing missing for me that I liked having in Quicken but now do in excel is the mortgage and debt payment projections where you can test different principal payment amounts and get life of loan interest totals and duration and such. Not hard to do in Excel but is fun to have in a fancy GUI like Quicken.
- Improvement idea: Would be nice if Savings Goals had option to set the start date after the goal is created. You can set this when you make a Savings Goal, but I haven't found the option (if it exists) to change the start date after the goal is created. This would be helpful.
I don't need to track business expenses nor do I need detailed investment tracking. If I needed to do either of those, I'd probably look to add Quicken or something like that to my toolbox. And yes, I said add because unless Quicken adopts Simplifi's spending plan methodology then I'd always want to have Simplifi for my budget. My overall opinion is that for personal finance needs and especially budgeting and planning savings Simplifi does a great job and is my favorite.
