Dec 22 2018

So long Quicken and Microsoft for that Matter!

Category: FinancePhil @ 7:16 am

For about that last five years, I was keeping an old Windows XP laptop around just to do my checkbook. I have already documented my need to balance my checking account and maintain a budget. I don’t think think most people use a budget to manage their spending, I think most people just spend what they have and hope for the best!  Over the past year, I have worked for  four different companies and each one had a different pay schedule.  One company paid weekly, which was very nice and seemingly minimized the need for a budget; another company paid monthly, which made having a budget very important.

I have been a loyal Quicken user since the early 90s; so loyal that I upgraded just about every year! Somewhere along the way, I abandoned Quicken and moved to Microsoft Money. Money was much more polished and worked very well. Unfortunately, Microsoft observed the same trend, recognizing that people were no longer interested in personal finance software and decided to stop supporting their Money product. I continued to use Money until Microsoft disabled my online access, forcing me to move back to Quicken.

I moved into a new place last summer and for some reason my little XP laptop did not survive the move. Since that was my only Windows machine, I had a little bit of problem.. no way to run Quicken. I researched running some Windows emulators on my Ubuntu machine, but did not go down that path. Instead, I decided to look into Linux options;  more than that, I wanted something that would be cross-platform, supporting  multiple operating systems and hopefully have some mobile or tablet support. I did quite a bit of research and decided to give Moneydance a try. Moneydance met most of my criteria and had a really nice trial option; it allows you to import or download an unlimited number of  transactions. There is only one limitation using the trial version, you can only manually enter 100 transactions. Because I was able to configure Moneydance to download transactions form most of my financial institutions, I was able to use the trial version for several months before hitting the limit.

Fortunately, I have good backup process and still had access to my Quicken files.  After jumping through  some hoops, I was able to export all of my relevant accounts to QIF files which I could then import into Moneydance. I had quite a bit of data, having over twenty years of investment transaction history.  Importing the data was a pretty trivial process as I remember.

Is Moneydance perfect? Probably not. If you are a looking at this from a Linux perspective, you will be pretty happy. The software is by no means “pretty”, but it has all of the features that I need.   I’m sure that some people might not get past the basic, no frills user experience, but it is a very solid application and I have zero stability issues.  I never thought that Quicken was very cool looking, which is why I switched to Money. After switching, I think Quicken stepped up their User Interface game and made Quicken much more attractive and user friendly.  I would say that Moneydance is far from user friendly but is still usable; I’m probably able to put aside all of my normal aesthetic requirements,  as it much more important that I can run the software on my Ubuntu box.

I think Moneydance works for me because it really works well for people that work from a budget perspective. The main screen has several components that help you manage your spending, including a calendar to show your upcoming transactions and reminders,  a snapshot of your budget’s current income to expense totals, as well as the ability to track and highlight specific budget categories. The main screen provides you everything you need to monitor your monthly spending.

I does all of the mundane transaction management activities

  • Download online transactions
  • Manage investment accounts
  • Setup and maintain a budget
  • Large variety of reports.

This has been setting in my drafts for 7 years, I guess it is time to publish it. And for what it is worth, I’m still using Moneydance!

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Jan 10 2012

Lost Art of Balancing Your Checkbook…

Category: Family,FinancePhil @ 12:02 am

I started to write about my move to a new personal finance software package and ended up on a completely different topic. I think this is an important subject, as I have two teenage boys and neither one of them has any money management experience. Fortunately, my oldest son started his first job last year, at the age of 16; it has been a very valuable life experience.  His first paychecks seemed to last less than a day, burning right through his pockets! To curb his spending sprees, I made him start a savings account; this was to save for college or something unplanned. After about a year, I can see that his paycheck has a little more value; it actually seems to last a little longer!  Now that he is spending more of his own money, he is starting to see the need for a little planning: gas for the car,  Subway, Slurpees, and going to the movies.

I did a Google search on the topic and it confirmed what I was thinking – people just don’t reconcile their checkbooks anymore! I think that ATM machines started the trend; with minimal personal effort and little training, we could easily see how much money was in our account – it was too easy.  On-line banking put the final nail in the coffin for  the “monthly reconciliation” process; the on-line systems are good at instantaneously showing us our financial situation.  I started using USAA this past year for just about everything, banking, credit cards, insurance, and investing; I even quit using Quicken to track my spending. Using their web interface, I could link accounts from different institutions, pay my bills, transfer funds, categorize and track my track spending habits. It is actually very well done and supports mobile devices too.  Unfortunately, on-line banks and services like Mint.com never implement the concept of reconciliation. Big deal you say, what’s the problem… it is all done by computer and computers never mistakes… right?

I liked these little quotes that I found on some forums, they truly show how technology has changed the perspective of the younger generations. I did not actually think I was that old, but apparently, I’m very old!  I actually have a budget and balance my checkbook.  Even stranger, I always enjoyed entering all of my transactions and monitoring my spending habits. Technically, I thought it was very cool, being able to pay all of my bills on-line (long before web banking enabled it) and even connecting to my financial institutions, downloading all of the cleared transactions. I tracked my  boys’ college funds and personal retirement funds; it was so fun to see all of the money I was making…  It was even more fun to watch my Fannie Mae stock plummet from $70 a share to $0.25. Needless to say, I don’t watch the market anymore!

Even with today’s technology,  you should balance your checkbook. I hope that all of the young financial planners out there, still see value in this practice. There are numerous good reasons, I just listed a few:
  • Checkbook balancing is a method of verification
  • Both banks and merchants can make mistakes
  • Overdrawn account, bounced check fees, monthly service fees
  • On-line Banking is not always real-time
  • Help you budget your money

I like to keep an eye on the transactions, I can easily make sure that I’m not double billed or paying for some unexpected transaction fee.  A topic for another post, is the value of budgeting. I bet even fewer people actually create monthly budgets. I have always maintained a personal budget, though not always been able to live within it!  Because I tracked my spending, I always knew where the money went and how big the problem was. I am back to using personal finance software; I manage and live within my budget and reconcile my accounts every month. It takes no time at all and I always know exactly where I stand. Unfortunately, I have not been able to get my son to balance his checkbook yet, but I do have all of his statements printed out and ready to go; we just never seem get to it. I now realize, this is even more important than I originally thought.. this is a fundamental life skill that I have to share with him, before he sets off on his own.

Over the past few years, a friend of mine has ranted about this problem several times; he actually wanted to teach high school kinds some basic money management skills. Amazingly, neither the public school system nor parents are teaching this fundamental skill, it should be no different from the other fundamentals: Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic. Now, you really know how old I am!  Here is good post that illustrates the point well,  Why Can’t Johnny Balance A Checkbook?

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