Hey all,

I'm trying to summarize my spending habits and manage my financial resources.

Looking for something along the lines of mint.com for the US cats out there, but wanted a less automated set up. I don't mind typing in my receipts and expenditures and stuff -- I just don't want to directly link to my bank accounts (I don't even think that's legal in Canada).

Does anyone know of anything along those lines? My current way is just using Excel spreadsheets. I was hoping that there was something easier/better to use.

I use www.expenseview.com

It CAN import stuff like xls and quicken files - but you can also do receipts manually. I just wanted to compartmentalize my spending to see where the big holes are (I impulse buy a lot)

I do online banking, but my bank's site is rated the best and most secure in Canada. I don't know if I'd want my financial info floating around some other companies servers.

Several of Canada's banks let you export your info from online banking to common formats like quicken, MS Money, etc. So you don't have to link your account but you can import the info manually. Quicken/quickbooks personal is cheap and easy, and safer than using cloud computing for your finances.

Canadian banks .. secure.. yeah right. the ex worked in head office for one of the major ones and I can tell you secure they weren't ;o)

Maybe not as secure from that standpoint, but we do have the most economically stable banking system of all G8 nations.

Which one did your ex work for? If it was CIBC, TD/Canada Trust or ScotiaBank I can easily believe you. I'm with Royal Bank of Canada, they've had the highest online security rating in Canada, one of the higest in the G8, for a few years now. About 5 years ago some hacker managed to get in and do something, after that they got serious about it and have had top ratings since.

Yes one of those mentioned at the time I was asked to try and hack into some of their 'secure' systems, whic I did returning personal information. Although these holes were late secured. At that time they also lost two backup disks with customers data amongst other issues.

This is a simple offline piece of software that works nicely... Personal Finances Pro v3.7