I bank at post finance, but they do not support quicken or downloads of transactions. I still have some investment and bank accounts in the US and love the ability to download all transactions.
Is there any Swiss banks that work with Quicken or some other software that works in Switzerland?
I don't download transactions, I sit with my husband and we put them all in together. I think the action of actually recording it all ourselves helps us to stay in touch with our spending, but I'm quite sure you can download information with YNAB.
YNAB has an easy way to keep track of multiple accounts, both 'on budget' and 'off budget' - the only thing it doesn't do easily is multiple currencies, but we came up with a 'workaround' (we send money home to pay off some debt each month)... I'm pretty sure they are working on the multiple currencies thing...we get regular updates on the software.
However, after 6 years here, I came to the conclusion that no Swiss banks support the direct transaction-synching that quicken offered in the states.you can only do manual web-downloads.
1) I have an Excel file where I can put all the raw data downloads from UBS and Post into a sheet.
2) I have a second sheet that formats and concatenates the data to get into a nice readable format.
3) I have an Excel Add-In that will allow you to save your Excel as a QIF (or webconnect?) file http://www.bigredconsulting.com/AboutXLQIFConverter.htm
4) Import into Quicken.
5) Dick around for a bit with the data and realize that I should be saving more.
Notwithstanding the effort with this approach I have simply concluded that Quicken is bulky and does not work consistently with the naming or reconciling of the accounts. Another major issue is they always (and continue to) force people into their locked file format and will not accept CSV imports.
What I do now is simply maintain a "high level" budget in Excel and then have automatic transfers between all my accounts. All of these accounts correspond to a different type of goal such as, household, vacation, investments, taxes, et cetera. Then I spend my remainder --If I have money left over then it goes into my savings sweep account. Once or twice a year I make some tweaks here and there but it is mostly running on autopilot.
For all my US accounts I have been using Mint (acquired by Quicken a couple years ago). I'm not 100% sure that I like their business model but there is no issue of security with them and it works much better than quicken. As it is a cloud service you can access it anywhere (and also on the ipad)
There is some Swiss banking software that I have used in the past but at the moment cannot remember the name...If I remember I'll reply again. It was good for downloading all the transactional data and then also transmitting payment slips but was very weak for investments.
Do you know how to select date format when converting a CSV?
There may be a way to get it into a proper looking excel format. Whether that will then help you upload it into budgeting software, not sure.
For years I have done my budgeting in Excel and I was quite frankly happy about it...until I saw YNAB. However, since moving to CH, over time I lost track of how much I spend monthly on smaller items (such as lunch, fuel, gadgets, eating out etc.) as I really never had much money to spend on this while living in DK.
I downloaded YNAB and started to apply a completely different mindset as YNAB is not just a budget program. YNAB actually change the way you think about spending and believe it or not, you will not only get a much better overview of your money (and where they are spent) but you will also get on top of the situation pretty fast so you don't have to live paycheck to paycheck.
Now I actually run out of month before I run out of spending money.....that is all new to me :-)
Check out YNAB here
YNAB cost $60 to purchase but this link will knock $6 off right away AND(just so this is clear) it will forward $6 to a new "let's meet for a EF coffee/drink fund" which just have been setup by me
The ones, Quicken and YNAB are worth the extra compared to the free online solution?
- I can't always remember
- the missus uses my account as well
- I have accounts in 2 countries (as I guess most of us are like this)
- excel is too cumbersome to actually follow up always
PostFinance has an E-Budget in E-Finance, and however it's nice to see it works quite consistently, it's not flexible enough, very high level.
Would be interested in the feedback of YNAB or Moneywell in the long run. I've just wrote PostFinance if they could supply a one-off CSV export of all transactions for 2013 - that'd be a good base for a backwards overview, maybe a good base for financial forecasting as well.
We just did a four week trip back to Australia and were working across both currencies and found that we could manage the aud accounts and chf accounts, and i uploaded the xe.com app and used that to do estimates on the credit card conversions and it seems to have worked out ok, and it was so much easier to keep control of the spending, well, actually, in our case, spend more because we knew we had the cash.
However, I don't use auto-downloads. We put everything in manually as we go. In our case this allows us to be better accountable, and make review decisions as we go along.
I don't know that it has really changed our spending patterns but we have probably quadrupled our income in ten years and I find it harder/more stressful now that there is more money involved and a lot more spending decisions. There was a time when $20 was my complete discretionary budget for a fortnight, and a maximum of $40petrol money to last two weeks, which basically got us to/from work and childcare and that was it.
Ynab syncs via the cloud and so I can make updates on the phone or ipad on the go, then use the more complex review functions on my laptop.
Pm me if you are interested and maybe we can find a good venue and time/day that works.
I'm usually very cost-conscious in my spending so I have my yearly budget for everything (insurances, billag, etc), and I'm quite reluctant to put 35 CHF for Billag every month, but I'd like to see the full amount (430CHF?) in my yearly budget *somewhere* to plan for.
BTW PostFinance has just called me and they have an export-option for all account movements at (currently OoS): https://www.postfinance.ch/java
To be honest, I don't use it that way, and I do tend to forecast ahead and it's absolutely possible to use it that way, it's just that the plan ahead philosophy will probably mean that you save substantially more in the long run.
Ynab allows for two options with leftover money, you can roll it over as surplus funds to start the next month, or you allocate to (as you say) to a savings or investment category.
They do have an excellent website and forum, and lots of videos etc so you can really get the concept and work out any problems you might have.