Tools

8 Best Alternatives to Quicken in 2021 (#1 is Free)

January 6, 2021 by Rob Berger

Quicken was once the go-to budgeting tool. I used it when it was first released in the 1980s. Today, it’s been eclipsed by apps that enable you to manage every aspect of your finances, often for free. Here are the best Quicken alternatives to consider in 2021.

Best Quicken Alternatives

Personal Capital–Editor’s Choice

Personal Capital is the clear winner when it comes to finding a substitute for Quicken. It’s free and it offers tools to manage every aspect of your finances. With Personal Capital, you can link just about every financial account you have–checking, savings, credit cards, retirement accounts, investments accounts, HSAs, and even your home (via Zillow).

Once linked, Personal Capital’s financial dashboard offers valuable insights into your finances. As an example, the tool enables you to–

Track your spending by category
Estimate when you can retire
Calculate the cost of your investments
Display the asset allocation of your portfolio
Generate a net worth statement
Get alerts when bills are due
Evaluate your investment portfolio
Save for emergencies

I’ve written a detailed review and guide of Personal Capital that you can check out.

Try Personal Capital

You Need a Budget (YNAB)–Best for Budgeting

YNAB is ideal for those looking just for a budgeting tool. In my view, there is no better app when it comes to creating a budget. YNAB’s interface is similar to a spreadsheet. The tool makes it easy to budget by category based on the money you actually have in the bank.

One of YNAB’s core principles is to give every dollar a job. You do that by deciding how you’ll spend every dollar that enters your checking account. As with other tools, you can connect your bank accounts and credit cards to YNAB. This allows for real-time updates so that you can track your spending throughout the month.

YNAB doesn’t have the rich feature set offered by Personal Capital. That’s particularly clear when it comes to investing. For those who don’t want to track investments, however, YNAB is a good option.

It’s not free, however. You can try it free for 34 days. After that it costs $11.99 a month or $84 a year for the annual plan. The cost is the biggest downside to Y NAB.

Tiller Money–Best Spreadsheet Budget

I don’t know how they do it, but Tiller Money has figured out how to turn a Google Sheet into a dynamic budgeting tool. You link your bank accounts and credit cards to Tiller’s Google Sheet tool, and it automatically downloads all of your transactions. From there you can create budgets, categorize spending and generate reports.

I’ve been using Tiller for the past month. It’s clear that Tiller is ideal for those who love working with spreadsheets. I will caution you that setting up Tiller can be a bit intimidating. The good news is that they have videos to walk you through each step. If I can do it, you can do it.

One thing to keep in mind is that you must manually categorize each transaction. For some, this is a show-stopper. They want the convenience of tools like Personal Capital that automate this process. For others, they would prefer to categorize transactions themselves. It forces them to look at each entry, understand how they spent money, and then properly categorize the expense.

There is no right or wrong here. It comes down to preference. You get a 30-day free trial. After that Tiller costs $79 a year.

PocketSmith–Best for Calendar Budgeting

PocketSmith started out as a calendar to plan upcoming income and expenses. Today, it’s a full-fledged budgeting app. You can synch your accounts with PocketSmith. Once synced, you can track your budget and you’re net worth. You can also see your income and spending in a handy calendar view.

One stand-out feature is PocketSmith’s auto-budget tool. It can create a budget for you based on past spending. It also has a cash flow feature that maps income and spending by date range.

While there is a free version of PocketSmith, it requires manual data entry. To get automatic bank fees, you’ll need to pay at least $9.95 a month, or $7.50 a month when paid annually.

CountAbout–Imports from Quicken or Mint

If you have a lot of data in Quicken (or Mint), CountAbout may be the budgeting tool for you. It has a feature enabling you to import data from Quicken or Mint.

CountAbout enables you to download transactions from your bank and customize both income and expense categories. You can even attach receipt images to expense transactions. You can set up recurring transactions and generate financial reports.

For the features you get, the cost is very reasonable. The basic plan costs just $9.99 a year (not a month). If you want automatic downloading of bank transactions, the cost is $39.99 a year.

Moneydance–Traditional Budgeting Software

With so many apps going online, Moneydance takes a different approach. You download Moneydance software rather than use it online. Once downloaded, the software works much like you would expect.

You can download banking transactions into the software and initiate bill pay. The software automatically categorizes expenses based on how you categorize them. In other words, it learns from your use of the program.

It offers a dashboard (shown above) that summarizes your finances all in one place. It can also generate reports and graphs to give you a visual perspective of your money. It comes with a mobile app, can track your finances, and can alert you when bills are due.

It costs $49.99 and is available for both Mac and Windows.

EveryDollar (now Ramsey+)–Best for Dave Ramsey Fans

For those Dave Ramsey founds out there, EveryDollar may be a good substitute for Intuit’s Quicken. Now the first thing to point out is that EveryDollar ain’t cheap. After a 14-day trial, you’ll pay $129.99 a year. If you want to try it for just 3 months, it will cost $59.99. For this reason, it’s not high on my list. Still, I know that some folks are passionate about Financial Peace University.

You can sync your bank accounts with the tool, set up budgets, and track spending. The budgeting app works on both computers, smartphones and tablets. It also comes with Dave’s educational materials, enabling you to take online course and join virtual groups.

Banktivity–Designed for Macs Only

Banktivity is the budgeting app specifically designed for Macs. It offers features that enable you to organize and track all of your finances. You can group accounts and reports, and organize the dashboard in a way that works best for you.

Banktivity enables you to follow an envelope budget. This can be ideal for those living paycheck-to-paycheck.

You can import transactions from your bank and sync data across all of your Mac devices. Banktivity also tracks investments and offers account-level reporting. You can try Banktivity for free for 30 days. After that they offer three plans ranging in price from $4.16 to $8.33 a month (billed annually).

Whatever tool you choose, the key is to pick one that works for you. For me, that’s Personal Capital. One or more of the above Quicken alternatives, however, should suit the needs of most looking to better manage their money.

Morningstar User’s Guide

May 10, 2020 by Rob Berger Leave a Comment

Welcome to the Morningstar User’s Guide. We’re going to cover everything you need to know about using and getting the most advantage out of Morningstar. In this first article and video, we’ll cover an overview of Morningstar. We will also look at some resources you’ll need as we work through this guide.

It’s my hope that this will help you become a better, more confident investor.

Table Of Contents

Morningstar User’s Guide Video
Morningstar Overview
Issues with Morningstar’s New Website
This Morningstar User’s Guide

Part 1: The Data
Part 2: Using The Data
Part 3: Portfolio Manager
Part 4: Morningstar Tools

Morningstar Resources You Need Handy for this User’s Guide

Membership
Snapshot and Glossary
Morningstar Search Tool

Morningstar User’s Guide Video

Morningstar Overview

Morningstar was founded in 1984. Before the internet as we know it, by Joe Mansueto. The story is that he started it in his apartment in Chicago with about $80,000. I don’t know if that’s true, but regardless, he started Morningstar in 1984. Today, it’s a publicly traded company trading under the ticker MORN. It went public in 2005.

Last year, Morningstar generated about $1.2 billion in revenue. By my calculations, individual investors who pay for the premium version of Morningstar accounted for only about $22 million. Most of the revenue comes from tools designed for professional money managers and investment advisors. Some of these tools can cost tens of thousands of dollars a year.

The good news is that Morningstar made a lot of its data available for free to individual investors. And its premium version, which offers additional tools, is only $199. So that’s the good news.

Issues with Morningstar’s New Website

Now, there is some bad news. Last year Morningstar made some substantial changes to its website. They launched the new website in July 2019. The look of the new site is an improvement, sort of.

Here’s what the old site looked like:

And here’s the current website design:

The problem is that the functionality took a big hit for several reasons.

First of all, they took away a lot of the tools and data that were available in the old version of the site. For example, the removed the after-tax returns of mutual funds, which I thought was a very helpful data point. There are ways to get at that information, and we will cover that when we get to it in the series. That’s the good news, we can still get back to this old version, for now.

Second, they haven’t bothered to update the user guide. The Premium User Guide for paid members still reflects the old website design and functionality. I reached out to Morningstar support, thinking I just couldn’t find the new guide. Nope. They haven’t updated it. I guess that makes this User’s Guide all the more important!

Finally, many of the tools that still exist are really hard to find. In the old version they had a menu item called “Tools.” Seems simple enough. That page now no longer exists. So there’s no one page to go to to see all of the tools Morningstar offers investors.

This Morningstar User’s Guide

This guide will be divided into four parts.

Part 1: The Data

The first part is going to be simply understanding the data. It’ll be creating a number of videos that walk through all of the data about mutual funds, ETFs an stocks that Morningstar offers.

Part 2: Using The Data

Now that we have all this data from Part 1, how do we actually use it to make important investment decisions? That’s what we will cover in Part 2. First, we’ll figure out of all of the data you get from Morningstar, what pieces of it are really important. And then once we know that, we’ll cover how to use the data.

How do we use it to pick a mutual fund in our 401k? How do we compare two mutual funds? So we’ll be looking at that in part two.

Part 3: Portfolio Manager

In Part 3, we’re going to be looking at the portfolio manager in Morningstar.
We will walk through the Portfolio Manager, showing you how to set up your own portfolio, how to add new holdings, and then the different ways you can use the tool to evaluate your investments.

Part 4: Morningstar Tools

In Part 4 we will look at Morningstar Tools. These include fund and stock screeners, calculators, and the X-Ray tool.

Morningstar Resources You Need Handy for this User’s Guide

To finish out this brief overview, I want to talk about some things that that you want to keep in mind that are important as we move through the series.

Membership

The first is the Morningstar membership options. For individual investors like you and me, there’s are two options. At a minimum, you’ll want the Morningstar basic membership. It’s free, and you will need it to create and monitor your portfolio. If you want the premium version, it costs $199 per year.

Here’s what the two options cover:

Try Morningstar for Free

While I’m a Premium member, it’s not necessary for most people.

Snapshot and Glossary

Two more things briefly, that I think you should focus on, or at least have handy. The first is Morningstar Snapshot definitions.This gives you the definitions of key terms and concepts that we will encounter throughout this series.

For example, Morningstar categorizes mutual funds as a stock, bond or balanced fund. One might think that a bond mutual fund invests in bonds. Well, it does, but Morningstar categorizes a fund as a bond fund if at least 80% of its assets are on bonds. As a result, a “bond” mutual fund could also have a not insignificant amount invested in equities.

As another example, consider Morningstar’s definition of an international stock fund. According to Snapshot, it’s a stock fund that has invested 40% or more of its equity holdings in foreign stocks. So don’t assume you know Morningstar’s definition of these terms.

A similar tool is the Morningstar Glossary. It offers a wider range of investing terms.

Morningstar Search Tool

The last thing I want to show you in this overview is the search box on Morningstar. This really is the door through which you’ll find a lot of the things that you need on Morningstar. For example, you can you the search box in several ways to find key information on Morningstar:

Ticker: Search an investment by its ticker symbol
Name: Search a mutual fund or stock by name
Screener: Search the term “Screener” to find Morningstar’s stock and fund screeners
Tool: Search the term “Tool” to find Morningstar’s calculators and other investment tools

Personal Capital Review and User’s Guide

May 9, 2020 by Rob Berger Leave a Comment

Personal Capital is a financial tool that enables you to manage 100% of your finances from a single dashboard. I’ve used the app for years. In this Personal Capital review and user’s guide, I’ll walk through all of its features and how to leverage them to help you make the most of your money.

This article contains references to products from one or more of our advertisers. We may receive compensation when you click on links to those products. The opinions and views expressed, however, are our own.

Getting Started with Personal Capital

The first step is to sign up for a free account. Then you want to connect all of your financial accounts. While Personal Capital is perhaps best known for analyzing and tracking investments, I also connect all of my bank accounts, credit cards, loans, mortgage, and even my home. You can add your home and Personal Capital will pull in the value from Zillow.

Get Personal Capital for Free

Linking Your Accounts

Over the years I’ve linked may of the following types of accounts to Personal Capital:

Bank Accounts (checking, savings, CDs, money market accounts)
Retirement Accounts (401k, 403b, TSP, IRA, among others)
Non-Retirement Investment Accounts
HSA
Credit Cards
Mortgage
Student Loans
Personal Loans

You can link just about any financial account for which you have online access. You’ll need your username and password for each account. To link an account, you’ll search for the name of your financial institution in the “Link Your Account” dialog box on Personal Capital (you get to it by clicking the “+” icon near the top left of the Dashboard):

Tip: You can search by the name of your financial institution or by its website address (url). In the unlikely event you have a financial account that can’t be linked to Personal Capital, you can enter it manually.

So why bother to connect all of your accounts? As you’ll see below, Personal Capital does a lot more than keep an eye on your investments. By connecting all of your financial accounts, you can track your net worth, budget, cash flow and even your bills. And all of this information is pulled together in a Dashboard.

Settings & Profile

Once you’ve linked your accounts, it’s critical that you complete your Settings and Profile. Both can be found by clicking on your name in the top right corner of the screen.

With Settings, you have control over email subscriptions, whether to include investment income and dividends in cash flow (I do), and any accounts to exclude from the advice Personal Capital offers (I don’t exclude any).

Settings also include important security features. It’s here that you can configure multi-factor authentication (highly recommended) and an alert anytime a login is attempted from a foreign country.

Personal Capital also shows you a list of the devices you’ve authorized to access your account and when the last sign-on from that device occurred. I’ll often delete old devices I no longer use from this list.

The Profile is where you can set information about you and your spouse, your savings, income sources, and investment objectives. These are important settings that Personal Capital uses in its planning tools.

Dashboard

Once you’ve linked all of your accounts, Personal Capital aggregates it in the Dashboard. The Dashboard gives you a snapshot of your entire financial picture. Here’s what the dashboard looks like:

As you can see, it gives you a snapshot of your net worth, your monthly budget, your cash flow, your investments, and even where you are on your retirement and emergency savings goals.

Net Worth

There’s nothing more important to your financial freedom than racking your net worth. While I’m a big believer in keeping tabs on it in a spreadsheet (which I’ve done for years), I also track it in Personal Capital. If you connect all of your financial accounts, it’s tracked automatically.

Here’s what the Net Worth screen looks like in Personal Capital:

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Personal Capital Banking

I’m surprised at how much I use the banking features of Personal Capital. The primary features that I rely on are the Cash Flow and Budgeting features. Specifically, the tool shows me how much investment income we generate each month (interest, dividends and capital gains). The budget tool shows me how much we spent and on what.

Cash Flow

Cash flow shows both your income and expenses at a transaction level. Expenses are automatically categorized. You can easily drill down into income or expenses to look at the details.

You can also select which accounts to include in the report. I use this account selection feature to look at just my business expenses (I’ve connected by business checking and credit card accounts). I also use it to look at income just from my investment accounts. This allows me to quickly see all dividends and interest earned in my portfolio.

Budgeting

The budgeting feature is not a traditional budgeting app. You can set an overall monthly spending goal, but you can’t set goals by category. If that’s what you need, I highly recommend YNAB (You Need a Budget).

What Personal Capital does well is give you visibility into how you’ve spent your money by category. It automatically imports all spending from each linked account and categorizes the spending. You can customize the categories. I’ve found Personal Capital to do a reasonably good job of getting the categories right, although I do spend about 5 minutes a month correcting some transactions.

Tip: In addition to categories, you can tag transactions, too. I use a limited number of categories, and than tag transactions as needed. For example, we have a home maintenance category. For work on our pool, I tag those transactions as “pool” so I can see how much we spend on the pool without need to create a separate categori.

Bills

The bills feature is another reason to link your credit cards, mortgage, and other loans. Personal Capital keeps track of when bills are due with your linked accounts. This helps you avoid missed or late payments, and it helps with planning throughout the month.

Try Personal Capital

Personal Capital Investing

Here’s where Personal Capital really shines. Once you’ve connected your retirement and non-retirement accounts, it tracks your investments automatically. It updates prices throughout the trading day and keeps tabs on mutual fund expenses. It also shows you your asset allocation and offers a number of tools to help you evaluate your portfolio

Holdings

You get an overview of each of your holdings. The tool shows the following for each investment you own:

The name of each investment
Its ticker
How many shares you own
The current price
The days change (in both dollars and as a percentage)
The total value

It also gives you an overview of your performance. Here’s mine in the middle of the 2020 bear market (Yikes!):

Personal Capital Portfolio performance Graph

Allocation

Personal Capital also shows you your asset allocation. It automatically evaluates your investments and reports on your stock/bond allocation. For each it breaks down asset classes further, showing U.S. and International stocks and bonds, as well as alternatives.

The tool also provides a useful interactive graphic representation of your portfolio allocation. With the click of a mouse, you can explore what investments make up each of these asset classes. One interesting item is cash. The asset allocation tool not only shows you the cash in say money market accounts, but it also sees the cash held by stock mutual funds.

Personal Capital Planning

So far the dashboard has simply shown you your accounts and investments from various perspectives. It’s the planning tools that really take the tool to the next level.

Retirement Planner

Personal Capital’s retirement planner is both robust and easy to use. Because you’ve connected all of your investment accounts, Personal Capital can use this data to determine your retirement readiness. The screenshot below shows you want the calculator looks like once you’ve linked your accounts.

There’s a lot going on here, so let’s break it down:

Profile: In the bottom right of the above screenshot is the “Edit Profile” button. It’s here that you can set your marital status, tax filing status, you and your spouse’s name and dates of birth, how much you each earn per year, and any children you have.
Assumptions: The “Edit Assumptions” button enables you to set an estimate of your effective tax rate, inflation rate, and your life expectancy.
Income Events: You can add ongoing or one-time income events. These may include your yearly savings, a planned sale of a business or other asset, pension income you’ll receive in retirement, and even an estimate of your social security.
Spending Goals: Spending goals can include an estimate of your yearly spending in retirement as well as one-time expenses. For example, you could include the cost of a planned vacation in retirement or the cost of a future wedding for your children.
Retirement Score: Your retirement score shows a percentage representing the likelihood that your money will last through retirement. According to Personal Capital, a score of 50% to 80% “suggests you are on track, but it is important to understand and acknowledge that the portfolio does deplete in a meaningful amount of the projected scenarios.” A score above 90% means “there is relatively little to worry about and, most likely, you could afford greater spending now or it will be possible to increase spending over time.”
Graph Views: The graph above shows the portfolio based on an analysis of thousands of potential market returns. You can also view your accounts by asset location (i.e., Taxable, Tax Deferred and Tax Free.

The Retirement Planner also enables you to create multiple scenarios and then compare them. For example, one scenario may have you retiring at a traditional age, while another one has you retiring early. In one, you may include an estimate of social security, while in another one you exclude it. You could also change the assumptions on one scenario related to your effective tax rate, future inflation, or your life expectancy.

Once you’ve created a new scenario, you can then compare them side-by-side.

Savings Planner

The Savings Planner is three tools in one: Retirement Savings, Emergency Fund Savings, and Debt Paydown. Each enables you to set and track goals.

Retirement Savings Planner

Here you can set an annual retirement savings goal. The planner tracks your actual savings throughout the year, including your contributions to retirement accounts like 401k and IRAs. It will also track any savings you have in taxable accounts.

Keep in mind that this planner and your Retirement Planner are connected. If you change your savings goal in one, it automatically updates the other.

Emergency Fund Savings Planner

For the Emergency Fund, Personal Capital totals the value of all of your linked bank accounts. It then recommends an Emergency Fund of 3 to 6 months worth of expenses based on the budget amount that you set. As with the retirement planner, any changes in your monthly budgeted amount here automatically updates your Budget in the Banking section of Personal Capital.

Debt Paydown Planner

Any debts, including car loans, mortgages and personal loans, will show up in the Debt Paydown planner. Note that credit card debt will also show up in the planner if there have been at least two interest transactions within the last 90 days. In other words, your credit cards will not show up here if you pay them off in full each month, thereby avoiding interest charges.

The planner will show each debt, along with its interest rate (APR), change in balance year to date, and current balance. It also displays a graph of the changing in debt balances in the current year.

Retirement Fee Analyzer

The retirement fee analyzer is, I must confess, my favorite part of Personal Capital. It’s easy to dismiss relatively “small” investment fees as unimportant. The problem, of course, is the effect fees have on your wealth over decades of time. A 1% advisor or mutual fund fee may seem small, but over time it can literally cost you hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Personal Capital calculates a weighted average expense ratio for all of your linked accounts. Mine comes in at just 6 basis points–0.06%. That’s well below the average, and yet it will still cost me $17,865 over the next seven years according to the Fee Analyzer!

Fees matter–a lot. This tool by itself makes Personal Capital a must.

Investment Fee Checkup

The investment checkup evaluates your asset allocation and compares it to what Personal Capital recommends. Based on your investment profile, Personal Capital recommends an asset allocation. Here’s what it recommends for me, given my age, years to retirement and risk tolerance:

Personal Capital target asset allocation — Recommended Asset Allocation

My actual allocation has about 5% more bonds than what the above graphic shows. What’s interesting about this tool is that Personal Capital also shows you the historical performance of its recommended portfolio, future projections, risk & return and a comparison with your actual allocation.

If you want to follow the recommendation, Personal Capital provides a listing of those asset classes that need to increased, decreased and by how much.

Personal Capital FAQs

Is Personal Capital safe?

Yes. Personal Capital encrypts data with AES-256 with multi-layer key management, including rotating user-specific keys and salts. Further, no individual at Personal Capital has access to your credentials.

In addition, you must authenticate each device that accesses your account. You’ll receive an automated phone call, email or text message to confirm your identity. You can learn more about Personal Capital’s security here.

Is Personal Capital really free?

Yep. It’s investment services are not, but its financial tools are completely free.

Will Personal Capital call me?

Yes. They use the financial dashboard as a marketing tool. I’ve spoken with their advisors in the past, although I’ve never used the investment services. If you don’t want them to call you, just tell them. They honored my request.

Do I have to invest with Personal Capital to use the dashboard?

No.

How much does Personal Capital cost?

If you do want to use their investment advisory services, the fees start at 0.89% for the first $1 million and go down to 0.49% for amounts over $10 million.

Try Personal Capital

11 Free Personal Finance Tools & Resources

May 9, 2020 by Rob Berger Leave a Comment

Personal finance tools can help you make the most of your money. From budgeting to investing, saving to improving your credit, the resources below will empower you to take back control of your finances.

Budgeting Tools & Resources

There is no one “best” budgeting tool. The best tool for you is one that you’ll use and that helps you spend less than you make. Here are several that I’ve used and believe are solid budgeting tools.

YNAB

YNAB, short for You Need a Budget, is the budgeting tool I use every day. It automatically downloads all of your transactions from bank accounts (checking and savings), as well as credit cards. You can categorize your expenses, run reports, and understand where your money is going.

It is a subscription model, but the cost is reasonable. I’ve found it to be the best tool to manage your money.

Mint.com

I used Mint for many years. It’s a free online money management tool. You connect your financial accounts to Mint. The app then downloads your transactions and categorizes them for you. It’s not perfect, but it’s right more often than not. You can then see where your money has gone and plan your budget going forward.

Savings Tools & Resources

Acorns

Acorns is a savings app that invests your spare change. You can link a debit or credit card to your Acorns account. As you spend money, Acorns rounds up your purchase to the nearest dollar. Once your roundups reach a total of $5, Acorns transfers the amount from your designated Spending Account (usually your checking account) to your Acorns account. From there, Acorns invests your money in one of several investment portfolios.

Stash

Stash is aimed at new investors looking to start with relatively small amounts of money. You can start with as little as $5 and invest in index ETFs or selected stocks. Stash also offers a unique debit card. It enables you to earn stock based on your purchases. While the reward rates are modest, it’s a good way to get started investing outside of a 401(k).

Qapital

Qapital is an app that helps you save money through what it calls goals and rules. Goals, as the name suggests, are savings targets you create based on your financial priorities. Qapital then enables you to create savings rules to automate the process of saving to reach these goals. Qapital also offers an investing account to help you reach your long-term goals.

Online Banks

For emergency fund and short term savings, online banks are my favorite. They pay the highest interest rates and come with virtually no fees. Online banks that I’ve used in the past include Ally, CIT, American Express Bank, Discover Bank, and Capital One.

Some investing tools, such as Wealthfront, Betterment, and Personal Capital also offer high-yield FDIC-insured savings accounts (see below).

Investing Tools & Resources

Vanguard

Vanguard is a mutual fund company that popularized index fund investing. You can set up just about any type of account, including IRAs and taxable accounts. From there, you can invest in target date retirement funds and low-cost index funds.

Fidelity

Fidelity also offers low-cost index funds and any account type you’d need. Its target date retirement funds, however, are expensive.

Personal Capital

Personal Capital offers a free financial dashboard. You can connect your bank accounts, credit cards and investment accounts. Personal Capital than provides automated analysis of your spending, asset allocation, and retirement planning.

Personal Capital also offers a high-yield cash account. It’s FDIC-insured and offers a competitive rate.

Check out my Personal Capital Review and User’s Guide for more information.

Wealthfront

Wealthfront is an automated investing service often referred to as a robo-advisor. It’s similar in theory to a target date retirement fund, however, it gives you more control over your asset allocation. It also offers excellent tools to understand your investments.

Wealthfront also offers a high-yield cash account.

Betterment

Betterment is also a robo-advisor, similar to Wealthfront. They both offer a simple way to start investing, but they both do charge a fee. While the fee is modest, we know from Retire Before Mom and Dad that every basis point in fees costs us a lot of money over our lifetimes. Still, I think robo-advisors are a reasonable choice for those who want a service that can handle your asset allocation and rebalancing.

How to Buy a Great Domain Name That’s Actually Available

April 17, 2019 by Rob Berger Leave a Comment

Getting the right domain name for your blog or website is critical. In this guide you’ll find everything from how to pick the best domain (that’s actually available) to where and how to buy the domain. You’ll also learn how to value a domain name and which add-ons are worth the price and which ones to avoid.

Buying my first domain name was a frustrating process. First there was coming up with one for my personal finance site that I liked. Then it was hoping and praying that the domain wasn’t already taken. As I share in my story about building an online business, I settled on doughroller.net. Probably not the best domain, but I’m not complaining.

I’ve learned a lot about domains since 2007. I’ve registered dozens of domains, bought a few, and sold a few. Based on this experience, this guide walks you through everything you need to brainstorm a great domain, check to see if it’s available, and then to buy it before somebody else snaps it up.

Table of Contents

What is a domain name
How to pick a domain name
1. How to get an available domain name you like
What’s the value of a domain
Where to register your domain
How long should you registered your domain name?
Should you buy add-ons
Final Thoughts

What is a domain name?

Let’s start with the basics. A domain name is what users type into a search browser to find your website. Also referred to as the url (Uniform Resource Locator), few people give much thought to the components making up a url. Pro bloggers, however, need to know how domains work.

Let’s look at an example: https://www.example.com.

https://: The Protocol

www: Subdomain.

example: Domain Name (also called the Second Level Domain)

com: Top Level Domain (TLD)

There are a few important observations about the above example.

First, when selecting a domain, you must pick both the domain and the TLD. Don’t worry about the protocol or subdomain. You control both of these once you have your domain and TLD.

Second, there are countless options when it comes to the TLD. Without question a .com is the most popular. In addition, .net and .org are common TLDs. You’ll also see .biz and .info from time to time. Today it’s even possible to create your own TLD, but the cost makes it impractical for most.

Third, subdomains are controlled by the owner of the domain. Once you own a domain, you can create any subdomain you want. For one site I owned I create a tools subdomain where I built financial calculators.

Finally, the protocol above has an ’s’ at the end. That stands for “secure” and indicates that the domain is using a technology called secure socket layer, or SSL for short. SSL encrypts communications between the user’s web browser and the website’s server. A protocol of http (hyper text transfer protocol) without the ’s’ indicates that the communication is not secure.

As you’ll learn in my guide to setting up a blog like a pro, every WordPress environment should have an SSL certificate and use the https protocol.

How do pick a domain name

Here we need to consider both the domain name and the TLD. Let’s start with the domain.

As you sit in front of your laptop searching for domains that aren’t already taken, some crazy ideas enter your mind. Just remember this—one seems cute or funny at 2 am in the morning isn’t so funny when you are trying to get the attention of the New York Times. Pick your domain name with care. It’s the one thing you can’t easily change once you’ve built a successful website.

Here are my 7 Rules for Picking a Domain:

Shorter domain names are better than longer names;
Easy to spell domains are better than those with tricky spellings;
Easy to remember domains are better than those that aren’t;
Easy to pronounce domains are better that those that aren’t;
Domains without hyphens are better than those with hyphens;
Avoid using numerals in your domain;
Branding is better than keyword based domains, but it can be a close call.

Number seven is worth spending some time on. What do I mean by branding versus keyword based domains? Here are some examples in the credit card space:

Creditcards.com (keyword based domain)
Nerdwallet.com (a little of both, but primarily branding)
Comparecards.com (a little of both, but primarily keyword)
Valuepenguin.com (branding)

Think of keyword based domains as domain names that contain generic words people search for in Google.

Here’s the thing to remember. Keyword based domains are great if it’s an exact match to the niche you’ve selected and it’s short (e.g., creditcards.com, cars.com, rothira.com). As you might imagine, however, most exact match domains of any value have already been registered.

Finding a balance between keywords and branding is your best bet. Here, nerdwallet.com and comparecards.com are good examples. The names relate to the subject matter of each website, are easy to spell and pronounce, and are memorable (at least Nerd Wallet is).

Now to the Top Level Domain (TLD). Without a doubt .com TLDs are best. That said, I built a multi-million dollar blog (doughroller.net) on a .net extension. My good friend J.D. Roth built a very popular and profitable blog with a .org extension (getrichslowly.org).

Still, the .com TLD is what most people type into a web browsers by default. Over the years running my .net blog I had countless people tell me they had trouble finding the site because the assumed it was a .com.

Once you’ve got an idea of the domain you want, it’s time to register it. Here’s where one big problem will likely arise. You’ve decided on the perfect name only to find out it’s not available. It will happen. Guaranteed.

How to Get an Available Domain Name You Like

When this happens you have several options:

Pick a totally different domain name;
Try to buy the domain from the current owner;
Get the same name with a different TLD; or
Modify the domain name in some way until you find one that’s available.

Option #1 is self-explanatory. Let’s take a closer look at the other options.

Buying a Domain

Buying a domain name is intimidating for beginners. I didn’t know what I was doing when I bought my first one. I paid $15,000 for it. In the end, it was a painless process and well worth the cost. More recently I bought this domain, robberger.com for $250.

The process is easy if the domain is owned by a service that’s in the business of buying and selling domains. They advertise a price, and you buy it or not. Of course you can negotiate as well. But they are in the business of selling domains. I bought this domain with a few clicks of the mouse.

If the domain is owned by an individual, as was the case with my $15,000 purchase, it can take some time. It took my over a year. Seriously. At first he claimed it was worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. It took him a year or so to come back down to reality.

Anyway, the point is you can buy a domain if there’s one you just have to have. For beginners, I’d avoid this approach if at all possible.

Use a Different TLD

It’s tempting to get the domain you want but with a different TLD. Today there is an explosion of TLDs. Here’s my advice. If you can’t find a .com domain you like, try again. If that fails, try at least five more times. Only then consider .net or .org. Don’t bother with other TLDs, like .co. Before you move away from a .com, however, consider modifying the domain name.

Modify the Domain Name

Some great domains are a combination of a keyword with a memorable modifier. Imagine you want to start a blog about student loans. I guarantee you that studentloan.com is already taken. So one entrepreneur landed on studentloanhero.com. I interviewed one of the founders of Student Loan Hero, Andrew Josuweit, back in 2016. LendingTree acquired SLH in 2018 for a cool $60 million (I’m sure my interview of Andrew had nothing to do with it).

The point is they took a keyword, student loan, and added hero to create a meaningful, memorable domain. It’s a great recipe for finding a solid domain that’s still available.

Here are a few examples to help spark your inspiration:

The
- thewirecutter.com
- thecollegeinvestor.com
- thesimpledollar.com
Smart
- smarthome.com
- smartpassiveincome.com
Hack/Geek/Dude/Dork
- lifehack.org
- lifehaker.com
- yogadork.com
ist
- nerdist.com
- minimalist.com
Mom/Dad/Guy/Gal/Mr/Mrs
- mrmoneymustache.com
- naturemoms.com
- moneysavingmom.com

And then there’s the totally creative angle:

catswhocode.com
threadbanger.com
theoatmeal.com

To see if a domain name is available, you can use this free tool from Bluehost:

What’s the value of a domain?

There’s one final consideration. Some attempt to assess the value of the keywords an exact match or near exact match url. Frankly, I’m skeptical that this is a good approach. Still, there are many tools available to estimate the value of a keyword.

Let’s using moneysavingmom.com as an example. What’s the value of the keyword “money savings”? Using a tool like ahrefs, we can estimate the cost to bid on that keyword through Google Adwords.

Simply type “money savings” into the keyword tool at ahrefs, and here is some of the data you’ll see:

value of a domain name — Estimated cost of bidding on “money savings” through Google Adwords

You could then compare the value to other similar keywords you were considering. For example, savingmoneymom.com. By simply reversing the order of the keyword, the value changes:

You’ll notice that the estimated search volume is notably higher for “saving money” than it is for “money saving,” which makes sense. How much this influence your selection is up to you. I focus more on branding than keywords. Still, it’s useful to understand the search volume and potential CPC (cost per click) of any keywords you may include in a domain name.

Where to register your domain

Once you’ve found a domain, it’s time to register it. That raises the question of where you should register your domain. Price is certainly a consideration, but so is the reputation of the registrar and ease of use of their website.

Here it’s important to distinguish between a domain name and hosting. You don’t have to host your blog at the same place where you register your domain. I have all of my domains registered at GoDaddy and Bluehost. Yet I don’t host any websites at GoDaddy and most of my sites are hosted at WP Engine.

ICANN, or the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, regulates the registration of domain names. They maintain a registry listing of companies through which you can register a new domain name. It’s longer than Sunday morning sermon.

Rather than wade through it, I suggest registering your domain with Bluehost. If you host there you get your domain for free for the first year. They also throw in a free SSL certificate. If you choose not to host with Bluehost, the cost is just $11.99/year for a .com.

I’ve also found the way Bluehost organizes your domain names to be simple and easy to use. You can quickly move from one domain to the next to make any changes to nameservers or other settings. I’ve also transferred domains to and fro Bluehost without an issues.

There are of course many other options. Google offers domain names for $12 a year. The domain comes with free privacy. As I mentioned, I’ve also used Godaddy and very much like its interface.

How long should you registered your domain name?

A common question I get is whether you can register a domain name for life. The short answer is no. There is no option to permanently register a domain. There are, however, some workarounds that will effectively enable you to buy a domain name forever.

First, you can register a domain for multiple years at one time. The longest I’ve seen is 10 years, which is how long I registered my flagship site back in the day through Bluehost.

Second, you can set your domain to auto-renew. When your registration is about to expire, the registrar will automatically renew it. Here it’s important to keep your credit card on file updated. Also, I set reminders as I don’t want to risk losing an important domain because the hosting company’s auto-renew functionality doesn’t work for some reason.

Should you buy add-ons?

Privacy Protection

Regardless of where you buy your domain, you’ll be offered add-ons. One such add-on is privacy protection. At Bluehost, it costs $11.88 per year. Privacy Protection keeps your personal contact information private. If somebody tries to reach the contact information associated with your domain (all domains must have contact information), it will go to Bluehost. Bluehost will then in turn send it to you.

The big question is whether you need it. My rule of thumb is that it’s best to have publicly available whois information. Studies suggest that it can be a positive factor for both SEO and email deliverability. I’m not convinced it’s a significant factor, but why take the chance.

That said, what you don’t want to do is make public your personal address, telephone number and email address. It will open you to spammers and potentially worse. If you are just starting out, haven’t formed a business, or work from home, pay for the privacy protection. Once you have an office or at least a business address you can use, make your information publicly available.

Extra Security

Some companies will try to sell you on extra security. They offer malware scans of your site, for example. They may also try to sell you on automatic renewals of your domain. Pass on all of these.

A good host should cover much of your security needs, and plugins (e.g., Sucuri) can handle additional security needs. As for automatic renewals, just about all registrars offer this for free (they want the revenue, after all).

Multiple TLDs

You may want to buy multiple TLDs to protect your brand. If you register yourgreatsite.com, you may not want somebody else snapping up yourgreatsite.net. In the past I’ve purchased the .com, .net and .org of a domain for just this reason.

Free Website

In some cases you’ll be offered a free website. While it may sound like a good deal, it’s better to pass. Keep in mind that WordPress is free. What registrars are offering in this case, however, is a “free” website on their own platform. You’ll be beholden to their platform, and the free typically goes away after the first year.

SSL Certificate

You don’t need to buy an SSL certificate with your domain name. You’ll get this as part of your hosting package (at least with the hosting companies I use and recommend).

Email

Finally, you may be offered email. If your website is yourgreatsite.com, for example, you could set you an email address of [email protected] You should pass on this, too.

The best way to get email setup for any site is to use Google’s G Suite. It’s very inexpensive, Google has the best spam filter, and you won’t be tied to a specific hosting company.

A Step-by-Step Guide to Buying a Domain Name

This video walks you through the steps to register a domain name:

How to register a domain name

Final Thoughts

A good domain name is the foundation for any blog or website. It gets harder and harder each day to find a great domain that’s available. Yet with a little creativity, you can find a domain name that will suit your blog or company well and registered it for just a few dollars.