{"id":1440,"date":"2017-01-11T10:43:52","date_gmt":"2017-01-11T18:43:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/moneyboss.com\/?p=1440"},"modified":"2024-04-16T13:30:51","modified_gmt":"2024-04-16T19:30:51","slug":"quicken-2017","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.getrichslowly.org\/quicken-2017\/","title":{"rendered":"Comparing Quicken to other personal finance apps"},"content":{"rendered":"
Welcome to the final day of my mini series exploring popular personal finance apps. As I prepare to track my spending<\/a> in 2017, I have to decide which tool to use.<\/p>\n In the olden days, there weren’t many options. Lately, however, there’s been a boom in personal finance tools. Rather than try every<\/em> available app, I elected to take a look at four that seemed like good fits for me: Quicken, You Need a Budget, Personal Capital, and Mint.<\/p>\n Earlier this week, I reviewed my experience with You Need a Budget<\/a>. Yesterday I compared Mint<\/a> and Personal Capital<\/a>. Today I’ll talk about Quicken.<\/p>\n And at the end of this article, I’ll reveal how I’ve decided to track my money during 2017.<\/p>\n For years, my personal finance tool of choice has been Quicken<\/a>. I used it to track my descent into debt during the 1990s, although those files are exiled to inaccessible 3-1\/2 inch floppy disks. That said, I have transactions in my Quicken datafile going back to 19 February 2004 — almost thirteen<\/em> years ago!<\/strong><\/p>\n <\/p>\n My records go back to when I was married to Kris and we were living in the small town where I grew up. I was still maxing out my credit cards, still living paycheck to paycheck, and still wondering why I had suck rotten luck. I hadn’t yet had my financial awakening. (That wouldn’t happen until October of 2004.)<\/p>\n I’ve tracked my income and expenses with Quicken intermittently during the past thirteen years. I used the program religiously from October 2004 until April 2009, when I sold Get Rich Slowly<\/a>. Then I used it again in 2011 and in 2013. So, my records are spotty. But they’re there. If I wanted, it’d be easy to compare my present habits to the past. (In fact, I just for fun I ran a net worth report on each year for which I have data!)<\/p>\n I use the decade-old Quicken 2007 to do the following:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Until yesterday, I hadn’t upgraded my copy of Quicken in over a decade. I stuck with Quicken 2007 — warts and all. I was fine with it. The software works. Better still, I know how to use it. I know how to make it do the things I want it to do. This is no small thing; in fact, as you’ll see, it’s probably the biggest determining factor in which tool I use to track my money.<\/p>\n Yesterday, however, I gave myself permission to upgrade to Quicken 2017<\/a>. I didn’t feel like it was fair to review the current versions of Mint, Personal Capital, and YNAB<\/a> against something a decade out of date! Let’s see how the new version compares to the old. <\/p>\n I’m pleased to report that it was quick and easy to copy my data from Quicken 2007 to Quicken 2017. (I’d been worried.) And the new software was easy enough to figure out. Compared to the older edition, the current version of Quicken looks much<\/em> prettier. (Quicken 2007 is downright ugly.) The interface is spartan and sleek.<\/p>\n Here’s the Quicken 2017 home screen:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n And here’s what the investments screen looks like. (Very nice!)<\/p>\n <\/p>\n This simplicity comes at a price though. Quicken 2017 has far fewer features than Quicken 2007. It offers similar functionality to Mint (also owned by Intuit) and Personal Capital but lacks the advanced reporting tools, planning calculators, investment tracking, and home finance utilities — emergency records organizer, home inventory, etc. — found in Quicken 2007. The new version is prettier; the old version is more powerful.<\/strong><\/p>\n Quicken 2017 does offer a few advantages over its elder sibling.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n That said, there have been some changes that make things more difficult rather than less. For instance, Quicken 2017 is not<\/em> designed for manual data entry.<\/strong><\/p>\n In the older version I’m accustomed to, it’s possible to enter transaction after transaction after transaction without ever taking your hands from the keyboard. That doesn’t work with the new version. Now you have to click the “new” button every time you want to enter a transaction — and if you want to enter a description in the Memo field, you have to click yet another button. Yikes!<\/em> So fussy. Plus, recent transactions are listed at the top of the screen instead of the bottom of the screen.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n I know I’m going to sound like a grumpy old man here but I can’t imagine entering data manually like this for an entire year. And I’m certainly not going to trust Quicken’s automatic categorization! (I’m assuming it’s similar to — if not the same as — Mint.)<\/p>\n Some of the reports in Quicken 2017 are…strange. Who the hell needs to see a “spending cloud” report? What a pointless feature.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n I didn’t like the registration process either. Even though it’s desktop software, you still have to create an Intuit account to use it. I have had nightmare experiences with Intuit accounts — for months, I was charged for a QuickBooks Online account I had cancelled — and I didn’t want to create one. But if I wanted to use the program I’d just purchased, I didn’t have any option.<\/p>\n The thing is, after using Quicken 2017 for a couple of days, I’m not sure I do<\/em> want to keep it. If I were starting from scratch (and didn’t have a copy of Quicken 2007 already), I’d almost assuredly opt for You Need a Budget instead. Quicken 2017 certainly isn’t terrible, but I see no reason to “upgrade” from my existing copy of Quicken 2007.<\/strong> Just call me Grandpa J.D., I guess.<\/p>\n So, after weeks of experimentation with four (well, five) different apps, how will I track my money in 2017? To be honest, I’m probably going to continue using all four<\/em> money tools I tested.<\/strong> Here’s why.<\/p>\n Mint and Personal Capital are relatively passive. Now that they’re set up, I don’t have to do anything unless I want to. (Well, I guess I have to manually update my credit union balance in Personal Capital since it refuses to connect.) Instead, I can open each app on my iPad now and then to see how things are going. I’ve been doing that with Personal Capital for several years already, so that’s nothing new. And if I don’t like the info I get from Mint, I’ll just stop using it. But again: there’s no overhead involved in continuing to use both of these.<\/p>\n There is<\/em> overhead if I choose to track transactions in Quicken and\/or You Need a Budget. But that’s overhead I want and expect. As I’ve said repeatedly, the process of entering transactions by hand forces me to confront my spending habits. Plus there’s something meditative and satisfying about balancing the books every week.<\/p>\n Right now, I intend to use both<\/em> You Need a Budget and Quicken 2007. Each offers features the other doesn’t. I’m open to the idea of moving completely to YNAB<\/a>, but I’m just not there yet. As you can tell, I love having a decade of data in a desktop app, so I’m not yet ready to give up Quicken. I suspect a likely scenario is this: I’ll use Quicken 2007, just as I always have; meanwhile, I’ll pay for a year of YNAB and use it to get my spending habits in check.<\/p>\n So, there you have it. Six weeks of money nerd experimentation has led to an indefinite conclusion. To me, there was no clear winner.<\/p>\n Based on my experience, I’d make the following recommendations:<\/p>\n I know there are other apps out there, and I’m sad I didn’t have enough time to try more of them during this process. That said, the hard work is now done. My accounts are set up in four different apps, and I’m actively tracking my spending. As readers suggest other apps to try, it’ll be easy enough to add them to the mix. And when I do, I’ll be sure to share my impressions with you!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Welcome to the final day of my mini series exploring popular personal finance apps. As I prepare to track my spending<\/a> in 2017, I have to decide which tool to use.<\/p>\n In the olden days, there weren’t many options. Lately, however, there’s been a boom in personal finance tools. Rather than try every<\/em> available app, I elected to take a look at four that seemed like good fits for me: Quicken, You Need a Budget, Personal Capital, and Mint.<\/p>\n Earlier this week, I reviewed my experience with You Need a Budget<\/a>. Yesterday I compared Mint<\/a> and Personal Capital<\/a>. Today I’ll talk about Quicken.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3287,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[502],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.getrichslowly.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1440"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.getrichslowly.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.getrichslowly.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.getrichslowly.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3287"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.getrichslowly.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1440"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.getrichslowly.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1440\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.getrichslowly.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1440"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.getrichslowly.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1440"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/span>Quicken 2007<\/span><\/h2>\n
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<\/span>Quicken 2017<\/span><\/h2>\n
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<\/span>Decision!<\/span><\/h2>\n
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