What is Managing Your Money 5.0?

If managing your personal finances emails more than balancing your checkbook. you may find that Andrew Tobias’ Managing Your Money (MYM) is the best financial assistant you can hire. In addition to helping with check writing and budgeting. MYM can assist in tax, insurance, and retirement planning as well as with portfolio management and net-worth tracking. The new version, 5.0, sports a Quicken 3 import facility and several automated features that save you lime and effort. In addition, MECA has slashed MYM’s price from more than $200 to less than $100.

MYM 5.0 includes tax tables for both 1992 and 1993, and you can choose either when asking the program's Tax module to project tax liabilities. The new version also provides optional password protection, so you can keep your financial records secure. Another enhancement lets you sort items in the Reconcile Accounts screen either by check number or by date. To simplify dividend reinvestment. the new version lets you set up automatic reinvestment of dividends and interest. In addition, you can now distribute dividend income on a per-share or a lump-sum basis.

Several of MYM's basic operations have been streamlined in the new version. Saving your work no longer causes all open windows to close, sending you back to the main navigator window. The scroll bar defaults to the end of a specified range in the Checkbook and Transaction registers, so you’re always looking at your most recent transactions. The Budget Shortcuts screen, which simplifies budgeting for income and expense categories, has been redesigned so that when you enter new amounts midway through the year, only future months are affected (the previous version reset budget amounts prior to the changes to zero).

If you’re a Quicken 3 user whose financial needs have grown beyond basic account balancing, you’ll welcome MYM 5.0's new Quicken 3 import facility. The program can automatically match Quicken 3 accounts and categories with those of MYM. Version 5.0 is also designed to work smoothly with TaxCut, a new tax-preparation package MECA will release by year’s end. You can export your MYM files in TXF format for direct import into TaxCut.

If you print payroll checks or allocation splits, you’ll appreciate version 5.0’s ability to print multiple budget allocations on check stubs, making record keeping easier. In addition, version 5.0 supports four additional check formats (available from Deluxe Business Forms).

Last, version 5.0 speeds the process of analyzing open positions by security. The program lets you view the total number of shares on-screen, so you don’t have to go through the previous version’s time-consuming process of printing a report.

Like all good checkbook programs, MYM has you enter recurring transactions just once. Also, because both the Tax and the Plan modules in MYM can predict future financial scenarios by combining all current data with assumptions about future income and expenses, MYM encourages users to plan their finances by creating what-if scenarios. Any changes you make are temporary, and values revert to their original amounts when you reopen the Tax and Plan modules.

In addition to its financial-planning features, the Plan module includes several useful calculation windows that determine bond yields, present and future values, and effective yields (when you know the interest rate). The module also adjusts dollar values for specified inflation or deflation rates over time.

The bank accounts you maintain in MYM’s Money module don’t change value until you've entered a specific transaction. In the program's Invest module, however, account values are in a constant state of flux as the prices of your securities, metals, and collectibles rise and fall. To keep these accounts current, of course, you must periodically update their prices manually, which can be time-consuming if you manage a large stock portfolio. Because stock prices are available from popular on-line services, it would be nice if you could have MYM download current prices automatically.

The Bottom Line

MYM’s extensive financial-analysis and reporting capabilities make it the ideal program for serious investors — whether their assets include real estate, stocks and bonds, precious metals, or fine art. Not only does MYM make it easy to track current financial worth but it also projects future income, expenses, and tax liabilities. For those who’ve been losing sleep wondering where their money’s going and how hard their investments are working, MYM beats any sleeping potion they can buy.

Lewis, Darryl. (December 1992). Managing Your Money 5.0. MacUser. (pg. 53).

Download Managing Your Money 5.0 for Mac

Architecture

Motorola 68K

Compatibility notes

Emulating this? It could probably run under: Basilisk II