Personal Finance Software

[JKKJ]

Help!

I was, until recently, a happy user of Quicken 99. Use it to track everything financial in my little world.

Intuit, no doubt angry that I haven't upgraded, recently dropped downloads of stock quotes for Quicken versions pre-2001. I have been expecting this for a while, so I'm not surprised (even if the cost to maintain the service must be pretty small). I do however need to have my updates done automatically within my finance program.

The real problem is that I can't bear to buy the new Quicken 2004 with PA, one year terms, advertising, etc from Intuit, nor can I stomach the Money product from Microsoft. Most of the other programs I've found look to be business-oriented, and aren't useful to me, or Linux-based, which I don't want to mess with.

Can anyone suggest any alternatives?

 

[Will Rickards WT]

What do you need it to do?

I used quicken deluxe 2000 for a while and just upgraded to quicken basic 2004. But with both I use a separate spreadsheet called checking account projections. This allows me to see what my balance will be.

So maybe something like this spreadsheet is sufficient for you?

 

[JKKJ]

Stock and mutual fund price updates are important for me. I could carry on with the version I have for everything else, as I've become used to it, and it does what I need, but not having investment updates done automatically would drive me nuts. Have you tried using the budgets for projections? I don't use them much but found budgets in Quicken 99 to be pretty good.

Do you find Quicken 2004 to be acceptable? Apart from the activation and the one year term for online service there seem to be some gripes about the usability of the program itself.

 

[Will Rickards WT]

I got used to the new version.
I just figured the less usable parts were because I got the basic version of 2004. But maybe I was wrong and 2004 went backwards in terms of usability.

2004 isn't as 'usable' as 2000 was to me.
I miss the main screen of 2000. It had most of what I needed in one screen.
It was more webby, if that is a word. The main screen was composed of little web parts. I could customize it and my main page had everything I needed.
I haven't played with 2004 default settings much. But I would describe 2004 as tabby instead of webby. There are more tabs all over the place. But in the main button bar it looks like a 16 bit app. The icons are big and ugly. It doesn't have the polish 2000 had.

Maybe a separate stock tracking program would work for you.

Is 2004 acceptable? Not really to my wife. She said she didn't like it. She isn't really a computer person so maybe her impressions are of more use.

I upgraded hoping maybe some of my banks would now be able to be imported.... but nope, not a one. Intuit lost a few marks in my book.