Thoughts on Quicken vs. Microsoft Money

While I wrote Quicken vs. Microsoft Money quite a long time ago (over a year), people still find (and comment on) it. Here's a recent comment from a reader that I thought was worth sharing:

I've been using a spreadsheet I've set up and refined over the years to track my financial standing.

About a year ago I tried out Quicken and found the learning curve more than I cared to climb. Tried signing up to download my bank account info, after working once it quit so I gave up on it and went back to my spreadsheet. Then this month the bank adds a fee of $9.95 for using Quicken to access my account info. No thanks and I had that shut off.

Perhaps there is some advantage to Money or Quicken if your taxes are complicated. I don't find mine that difficult -- the only other forms I file are schedules A & B and it's easy to set up a spreadsheet to do the math.

I've gotten away from tracking every single penny I spend. That was good to set up proper habits. Now I track broader category savings goals and it works for me. Have also set up estimations of retirement income so I can properly save for that. Also began charting net worth on a monthly basis.

Perhaps most would benefit from using Quicken/Money, but I get along fine without.

Personally, I'm one of those who likes to see where every penny is going. In addition, my taxes are fairly complicated and even though I use a CPA to do them, I still need the information Quicken provides to give her the data she receives. So I use Quicken for tracking spending and investments and use my own, self-developed spreadsheet for budget planning.

As I've stated before, I think that for financial newbies, You Need A Budget is a great alternative to Quicken and Microsoft Money. But for more-advanced users, I see it as a complement to Quicken or Microsoft Money. I use my own spreadsheet simply because I have done so for several years now and what's the point of switching?

For more on this topic, see these posts:

• YNAB Question of the Month: How Does it Compare to Quicken and Microsoft Money?

• The Benefits of You Need a Budget

• Budgeting Part 1: Creating a Family Budget

Comments

[Michael]

Have you tried Moneydance? What do you think of it? There seems to be so many different opinions of Quicken that it's hard to decide whether it's a good product or not. The opinions even vary between different versions. I tried the demo version of Money, but I didn't really care for it. I didn't like the web browser like interface and some of the features I clicked on led me to sections with advertisements. I don't want to see ads in a product I pay for.

I still haven't decided which version is best for me. For now I'm using the demo version of Moneydance and I may end of buying it. But I worry that it won't have all the features I might need.

[Binary Dollar]

Give me Excel any day. The other products are too feature rich and it makes it complicated. Using Excel, you can start off simple and the calculations evolve as your finances become more complicated.

[Mike]

This was my comment highlighted by FMF. I'm able to get away with this approach because (1) I've developed spending control habits in the past using a system to closely track my spending (although still spreadsheet based) and (2) my income relative to my spending habits is high enough. Also I'm a bachelor so there's no one to coordinate spending with.

If my circumstances changed, such as a reduction of income or I got married, I probably would return to tracking expenses more closely. And I'd probably use a spreadsheet to do it.

[Lord]

It probably depends more on what was available when you started managing your finances than the attributes of any particular software. People develop processes and procedures that work so modifying them becomes undesirable unless demonstrable improvement can be seen. For example, I still balance my checkbook by hand and four utilities, four credit cards, and one other check a month isn't enough to justify a more complex approach. My brother swears by Quicken, but I keep my finances extremely simple and this works for me.

Keeping a full set of personal financial statements including assets and expenses in Excel for decades has made me reticient to change. I track to the dollar but while investments are monitored monthly, expenses are sufficiently uniform to only be monitored yearly. The long range perspective is more important to me.

[Joey]

I am just starting out my Excel spreadsheet to track my finances. I think I prefer the excel spread sheet cause I am in full control of it.

One things I was thinking about is that everyone always talks about their own Excel spread sheets that they have developed. There should be something on this site where people can post ideas or there own Excel docs up so people can see them and get ideas for their own.

Just a thought.

[Hans]

I can highly recommend taking some time and setting up Quicken. I've been using it for about a year now and am still discovering new (and useful) functions. It's incredible! You can also start small in Quicken - no need to configure everything from the start. It saves me so much time I used to waste manually updating my spreadsheets.

Excel-lovers, you don't know what you're missing!

[Andy]

I, too, was taken by surprise by the fee for downloading data from my bank into Quicken/MSMoney and that promptly ended it for me. Now I use Mint.com and I'm very enthusiastic about it. It basically runs on autopilot -- downloading transactions from every bank account/credit card/loan/investment, categorizing, budgeting etc. My favorite part are the alerts. It will email or text me for just about anything I want.

It's probably not going to work quite as well if you feel the need to build your own complex category system, although it supports it, because then it might have a harder time automatically categorizing transactions. It also is still in it's infancy when it comes to features. I would use GnuCash if I had the discipline, but I like Mint because it just works for me and I barely have to touch it anymore and it's free -- even to download data.

Oh, and the part about giving them ALL of my bank account numbers, user names, passwords, security questions and answers doesn't really spook me too much. That could be a sticking point for some people.

[Andy]

Oops... necropost. Oh well.

[Anthonyzhang Zhang]

I believe there will be a better solution soon.