I’ve been up half the night due to the excitement. What could be so great?! I finally found personal finance software for Mac that helps me relate to my money the way I want to. Any Mac user will understand how awesome that is. After trying Quicken, iBank, Moneydance and others, MoneyWell has got me hooked! Here’s why I’m excited (both about the software and about my financial future).

Let’s start with a little commentary on personal finances for the future. One of my friends traveled to China for a tradeshow. Upon return he found that the bank had bumped up his payment due date without notice. After making his payments on time for several years thanks to auto-scheduled debits, he was late once. Guess who cut his credit line and started charging him higher interest? Never assume that debts to a bank won’t bite you as long as you make your payments. Right now, the banks own me and I HATE that thought. Who’s really in control?

With the current economic state, and the coming ripple effects of the government’s “spend even more using debt” approach, I’ve decided my best chance in the future is to take back control now and never play a part in this debt financing mentality again. My biggest goal this year is to become debt free. Yeah, I said “year.” You can surmise that’s going to take an aggressive payoff plan. And for someone with irregular income, that’s going to take very careful planning. It won’t be fun…I’ve already said no to an opportunity I’m not even permitted to tell you about yet. Ugh, it could very well have changed my professional future, but it required that I continue the spend first and pay debt later approach. It’s like asking a single person about their approach to dating, and after a nice long answer, asking them how it’s working for them! Believe me, I had to look in the mirror on that one too. hah

So why do I want MoneyWell on my team? Simple. It won’t allow you to spend money you don’t have yet. Step one, set up a reasonable spending plan. Two, schedule your income payments. When they come in, turn on the spigot (quite literally…you have to see it!) and the money flows out of the income bucket and into the spending buckets you’ve set up. Why is that so cool? Because that money is no longer counted in your “available balance.” Looking at a bank account or any other personal finance software, the available balance includes all money even if it’s been earmarked for certain bills and expenses.

Check this out…let’s say I budgeted $50 for catching up with friends over happy hour, but this month was slow so only $35 was spent. Normally, that just shows up in an over/under report and you move on to next month and budget $50 again. Well, with simple drag and drop, you can move that extra $15 to a different category! Maybe it’s one that was overspent, or better yet, maybe it’s your savings bucket. If you choose to do nothing with it, it gets added to next months budget so you’ll have $65 allocated to this category. This is especially cool when the categories we’re talking about are debt payoff, savings, or upcoming expenditures that are big and hairy that you need to start saving for today.

So take a look at MoneyWell, download the free trial. I was blown away that after an entire day of trying other software, in 45 minutes, I had my bank transactions downloaded, sorted and allocated to buckets. I also knew in that short time, what I could keep spending on and what I needed to cut back on. I’d also made all the drag and drop adjustments to make up for my mistakes in spending for the last month.

Perhaps best yet, Kevin Hoctor, the man behind it is an entrepreneur just like any of us. He has lived with all the same cash flow confusion that it brings to us. This is a small company with responsive customer service and a great user community helping everyone out. I try to reserve my endorsements for things I truly believe in, but I truly believe this will do for personal finance, what David Jay did for photographers getting their work online with Showit.