Too Good to be True

I have spent the last two days in the throes of frustration.  Mint is dead to me.  Not the yummy goodness that is Blue Bell Mint Chocolate Chip and certainly not the Girl Scout Thin Mints that have found their way into my fridge.  No, mint.com in all its seductive glory is dead to me.  I actually gave up on it last October when I realized that some bug in their system makes my data totally unreliable.  Just a minor glitch.  I should have known it was too good to be true.  But the shift from Quicken to Mint was so extreme in methodology, that I feel like I ate from the forbidden fruit and now I know the difference between slavery to the old way and the possibilities of technology that actually works for me.

So I have been searching for a workable solution since October.  Well, I lie.  I actually gave Mint the month of October to resolve my open help ticket.  That didn't happen, so I said I would find something new in November.  I landed on buxfer.com toward the end of the month and was so not motivated to try anything new during the holidays.  So I let it slide, and slide it did.  When I started getting back to it this month, I was shocked at how we had overspent because we just had no clue what we were spending.  So, I summoned all my motivation and jumped back in the saddle.  But buxfer just isn't cutting it for me.  For starters, it appears that it might have a bug similar to the one in Mint.  But more than that, it is obvious that paying for "priority support" means nothing, zip, zero, zilch.  J tried to console me by explaining that most of these new applications are run on a shoestring budget and customer support doesn't really make them any money, so they don't have any customer support.  This is not comforting.  I am so frustrated at the time I have wasted and data I have lost trying to find a good system.

I took the girls to a friend's house today and I came back and spent two and a half hours (!!!) researching almost two dozen different personal finance applications.  Yuck, yuck, and more yuck.  I cannot believe I spent my child-free morning doing that!  I made myself do it because it is my single biggest responsibility as the manager of this household (outside of parenting).  Everything else I wanted to do involved spending money, and I sure wasn't going to go do that because I don't know how much money we have to spend because I can't find a decent budget system!  Aaarrggh!

Since I know you're just as frustrated as I am by now, I'll offer some hope.  I think I might have found a couple of potential options.  I started from Dave Ramsey's list of recommended sites and narrowed them down.  I'm going to field test BudgetTracker and BudgetPulse.  It's 2010, dang it.  There has to be a budgeting solution out there that automates a significant part of the process, maintains my data integrity, and backs up their program with decent customer support.  Is that too much to ask of Web 2.0? !  I am such a computer geek's wife.  Time for some Thin Mints.