Well, it’s that time of year when many of us turn our thoughts to the old bank balance.
So, in this post I thought I’d point out one web site and one bit of free software that might help you to get things under control.

The web site, which you might well have come across, is Martin Lewis’ MoneySavingExpert.com . Martin is well known from television, radio and newspaper columns, and his site really does give an enormous amount of impartial advise and comparisons of all sorts of products - not only financial. You will also find various template letters to help reclaim money from banks, credit card and mortgage companies.

Have you ever wondered how all of the different ‘comparison’ sites on the Internet make money? Some of them even afford very expensive TV adverts. Well, they usually make money by getting a referral fee when you click through on one of the links in their site. There’s nothing wrong with that of course because it doesn’t cost you any extra, but the truth is that many of them are not exactly impartial. There’s a great temptation to push the products that give the most return. Not so with MoneySavingExpert. Martin is a ‘man-on-a-mission’, the sub title of his site is ‘UK Consumer Revenge’. He’s totally up-front about the way the site makes money, take a look at the ‘How the site is funded‘ page.

The free software is a piece of accounting software for personal finances and small businesses. It can run on Windows, does double entry book-keeping, scheduled entries and produces some useful graphs. I’ve been using it for household finances for the last six weeks and find it very helpful. You can look at the GnuCash main web-site for more information, or download it from Sourceforge (where you will be directed to anyway). Scroll down the page and look for the heading ‘gnucash stable’, unless you know otherwise choose the underlined link, ‘.exe (32-bit Windows)’. When asked, save the file to your computer and then ‘run’ the program. This will install the software.

For those of you who are unaware there is a lot of excellent free software on the Internet. Really, you don’t always have to pay for expensive commercial programs. I know this can be hard to get your head around, people giving away something for nothing - unbelievable! Well, that’s the nature of a large part of the net. For example, the majority of web sites on the Internet, including many of the big commercial ones, are hosted on Apache servers - totally free software!

WARNING Having said that, don’t just download anything that’s offered to you - that’s just asking to get your computer infected with viruses etc. If you are going to download the above software I suggest, as always, that you check the ‘about’ pageto make a judgement about the site. Another good idea is to Google the name of software and of the site to see what other people are saying about them.