Quicken's future direction - a cause for concern

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Peculiar_Investor
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Quicken's future direction - a cause for concern

Post by Peculiar_Investor »

It seems that Quicken is testing a new model on us Canadians.

The talking point:

• Quicken has moved to a subscription model in Canada for Quicken 2017 where (a) the annual subscription price is the same as the annual price under the 3-year cycle model, i.e. a substantial price increase, (b) when this annual subscription expires the ability to make manual transactions also ends, i.e. customers' data is held hostage and (c) anyone who upgrades to the subscription version likely won't be able to go back to pre-2017 versions to do manual transactions, i.e. because each year's upgrade also converts data formats.

• Quicken could expand this subscription model to its primary market in the US based on their experience in Canada. So now is the time for US customers to make their objections known to Quicken. If people just wait until fall to see if Q2018 changes business models it may be too late.

Anyone interested can join the conversion conversation and provide feedback to Quicken on their forum, see Quicken Inc should reverse its decision to change to a subscription that makes the user's data read-only if they stop paying | Quicken Customer Community. You might even recognize a few usernames and some of this text. :D
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Uncle Pennybags
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Re: Quicken's future direction - a cause for concern

Post by Uncle Pennybags »

Quicken sucks and I'm ready to dump it. The year they stop letting me do manual entries is the day I stop up grading. As it is with a fully paid current Quicken I have to enter a third of the transactions manually.
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Re: Quicken's future direction - a cause for concern

Post by JamesSFO »

Wow way to pound the program to irrelevancy.
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Re: Quicken's future direction - a cause for concern

Post by Bylo Selhi »

Peculiar_Investor wrote:Anyone interested can join the conversion and provide feedback to Quicken on their forum...
You mean conversation. Under the new business model the last thing anyone should do is join the "conversion" of their data to this year's format and then find that they can't go back to an older, unlocked version of the product.

Quicken has broken trust with its customer base, at least in Canada. It would be foolish to assume that they won't also break that trust with their primary market in the US and/or break that trust in new and even more objectionable ways in the future.

Don't let them put us all over a barrel. Have your say now, before it's too late.
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Re: Quicken's future direction - a cause for concern

Post by Peculiar_Investor »

Freudian slip now fixed. Thanks.

Tip of the hat to Bylo here for initially raising awareness of the issue on the site forum FWF, see Quicken 2017 [Caution about upgrading].
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Re: Quicken's future direction - a cause for concern

Post by Kenkat »

What is the annual subscription price they are charging? I wouldn't necessarily have an issue with them charging something in the neighborhood of $20/yr. if that kept the product viable.
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Re: Quicken's future direction - a cause for concern

Post by Peculiar_Investor »

From Quicken Home & Business | Quicken they want CAD 89.99/year. This also removes retailers like Staples and Amazon from the places to purchase, so no "sale prices". $89.99/year seems outrageous to many.
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Re: Quicken's future direction - a cause for concern

Post by jhfenton »

I wrote Quicken off many years ago based on the deteriorating quality and lack of commitment. I'm not surprised at the new over-priced subscription model, and I'm not optimistic that it will lead to a better product.

I'm not totally opposed to subscriptions. I subscribe to Office 365, but that gets me Office for 5 computers (Mac or PC) and 10TB of online storage. I also subscribe to a photography package from Adobe (Lightroom and Photoshop, Mac and PC). But those are well-maintained, frequently-updated cross-platform programs as well.
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Re: Quicken's future direction - a cause for concern

Post by TravelGeek »

Welcome to the Cloud business model. You no longer "own", you rent. Like Adobe with its Creative Cloud.

I work on cloud software every work day.... and try to avoid this lock-in wherever possible. Thanks for the heads up.
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Re: Quicken's future direction - a cause for concern

Post by Bylo Selhi »

Peculiar_Investor wrote:$89.99/year seems outrageous to many.
Up until now the regular price was about that too. However you only needed to pay it every 3 years in order to keep getting stock/ETF/MF quotes and be able to download transactions from your financial institution. Now they've effectively tripled that price by making it mandatory to renew every year.

While no one likes cash grabs, especially of that magnitude, this change pales in comparison with preventing users whose subscription has expired from entering transactions manually as was the case until now.

There's a further wrinkle that in recent editions of Quicken your IntuitID (soon to be QuickenID) had to be validated by logging into their website every few months. That means that even if you keep all your data on local storage you may be locked out if you can't reach Quicken's servers or if Quicken decides to expire inactive IDs, etc.
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Re: Quicken's future direction - a cause for concern

Post by DetroitRick »

Thanks for posting this, since it may well migrate south to the US eventually (I'm Detroit, so North, for me :D ).

I prefer the subscription model for my key software, and have even come to prefer that model for Microsoft Office. It ensures a constantly up-to-date software feature set. However, I strenuously object to Quicken doing this at the present time because they do too poor of a job in rolling out bug-free software upgrades. Fix that FIRST, and then I'll be on board. While they do seem to be getting better with update integrity, I think they have a long way to go. I love those "mondo" patches. But I do not want my workflow interrupted by frequent glitch-filled updates. So down the road, when performance is proven, I'll get on board. But not now, and not soon.

Second objection - if not renewed in a year, my data file becomes read-only??? No downloads I'm okay with, but read-only files - no way. That's a big objection for me, and one not likely to go away. I can just imagine if Microsoft attempted this with Excel or Word. What is Quicken thinking?

I'll have to keep my eye on this and the Quicken Community thread you posted. Hopefully Canadian early-feedback will head this off at the pass.
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Re: Quicken's future direction - a cause for concern

Post by Uncle Pennybags »

kenschmidt wrote:What is the annual subscription price they are charging? I wouldn't necessarily have an issue with them charging something in the neighborhood of $20/yr. if that kept the product viable.
Quicken has gone to the dark side; this amounts to ransomware. I just noticed with my purchase of Turbo Tax I get a free one year "subscription" to Quicken 2017.

So is 2017 the last US version that will be forever software? This subscription software is the holy cow for milking "subscribers". Do not resist the "cloud", resistance is futile.
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Re: Quicken's future direction - a cause for concern

Post by gator1 »

I'm shocked how many people still poor money into Quicken. There are free alternatives. I wouldn't spend $1 on Quicken.

Quicken doesn't hire people directly. They outsource. Workers make $9/hr and no benefits through a staffing company. The workforce is a mix of American and Philippines. Most work from home.

When you call in for support you are immediately routed to an American support agent working from home. When you chat in you are immediately routed to the Philippines, none of which actually work for Quicken. They are "trained" for a week and shipped out to take live support. It's a joke.

Quicken is a company on its last leg which is why Intuit wanted to drop them fast and why they are so understaffed(which is why you wait forever on hold to talk to someone.)
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Re: Quicken's future direction - a cause for concern

Post by slapfish »

The private equity firm that now owns Quicken (H.I.G. Capital) also owns Outback Steakhouse. If this goes through, I've definitely had my last Bloomin' Onion (though my arteries would probably thank me for that).

On a serious note, it'll be interesting to see how this works out for them. On the one hand, you could argue that Quicken users in general are pretty engaged and serious users of the product, and possibly willing to pay more for the product. On the other hand, I have a hard time seeing how pulling this stunt, with such a skewed pricing structure, will work with a customer base that, by definition, is more financially savvy than average.

I have a hard time seeing how this will end well for them. But then again, desktop licensed software is a business in secular decline (note that Intuit sold Quicken but kept Mint), so maybe squeezing a few incremental dollars out of a declining business will be enough to meet the IRR expectations of HIG's investors if Intuit sold for enough of a discount.
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Re: Quicken's future direction - a cause for concern

Post by NYCguy »

I love Quicken and upgrade every year but I do not like this development. I will balk at a subscription model. Thanks for the heads up. This is a bad business move.
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Re: Quicken's future direction - a cause for concern

Post by frugalfraggle »

I've mentioned this before - I use Banktivity instead of Quicken. Just note that it is Mac only, they haven't gone full subscription (yet?).
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Re: Quicken's future direction - a cause for concern

Post by deskjockey »

I definitely don't like what they are doing in Canada and hope it doesn't work out for them. Does anyone know of a similar product to Quicken that allows you to manually enter and reconcile transactions, as well as track your portfolio?
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Re: Quicken's future direction - a cause for concern

Post by BolderBoy »

gator1 wrote:I'm shocked how many people still poor money into Quicken. There are free alternatives. I wouldn't spend $1 on Quicken.
Tell us about the alternatives, please...
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Re: Quicken's future direction - a cause for concern

Post by student »

I never liked Quicken. I used Microsoft Money until it stopped updating stock quotes, then I switched to Quicken. For investment tracking, I use Personal Capital and Fidelity. (I don't give them my passwords, I manually entered the portfolio.) For expenses, I have gnucash.
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Re: Quicken's future direction - a cause for concern

Post by gator1 »

BolderBoy wrote:
gator1 wrote:I'm shocked how many people still poor money into Quicken. There are free alternatives. I wouldn't spend $1 on Quicken.
Tell us about the alternatives, please...
Personal Capital(My personal favorite), Mint, GNUCash.

For more info on Personal Capital: https://investorjunkie.com/39153/switch ... l-capital/
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Re: Quicken's future direction - a cause for concern

Post by BolderBoy »

gator1 wrote:
BolderBoy wrote:
gator1 wrote:I'm shocked how many people still poor money into Quicken. There are free alternatives. I wouldn't spend $1 on Quicken.
Tell us about the alternatives, please...
Personal Capital(My personal favorite), Mint, GNUCash.

For more info on Personal Capital: https://investorjunkie.com/39153/switch ... l-capital/
The first two are on-line based only, correct? Have you tried gnuCash? It is pretty cumbersome to set up on a Windows machine (haven't tried using it on a *nix machine, yet.
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Re: Quicken's future direction - a cause for concern

Post by Frugal Al »

I like Quicken and use every feature of the software. I could go with an annual payment of $30 to $40 bucks or so, but anything approaching $75 to $80 and I'll be done with it.
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Re: Quicken's future direction - a cause for concern

Post by gator1 »

BolderBoy wrote:
gator1 wrote:
BolderBoy wrote:
gator1 wrote:I'm shocked how many people still poor money into Quicken. There are free alternatives. I wouldn't spend $1 on Quicken.
Tell us about the alternatives, please...
Personal Capital(My personal favorite), Mint, GNUCash.

For more info on Personal Capital: https://investorjunkie.com/39153/switch ... l-capital/
The first two are on-line based only, correct? Have you tried gnuCash? It is pretty cumbersome to set up on a Windows machine (haven't tried using it on a *nix machine, yet.
I've tried GNUCash, and out of the 3 I mentioned it's my least favorite.

The other 2 I only use on my iPhone, and like PC better than Mint. I'd take free Personal Capital over a non-free Quicken any day. I wouldn't mind Quicken for Mac if it was free, but I'd never pay for it. Edit: All my accounts that would link to Quicken, link to Personal Capital with no issues.

*I know the insides of Quickens business practice very well and therefore would never spend money on their products and have a pretty good idea about what is about to happen to their business. I'll leave it at that.
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Re: Quicken's future direction - a cause for concern

Post by Bylo Selhi »

BolderBoy wrote:Tell us about the alternatives, please...
I recently heard about KMyMoney "the BEST Personal Finance Manager for FREE Users, full stop." Like GNUCash this is open source (and uses double-entry accounting.) There are versions for both Win and Mac.
Accuracy.
Using time tested double entry accounting principles KMyMoney can help ensure that your finances are kept in correct order.

Ease of use.
KMyMoney strives to be the easiest open source personal finance manager to use, especially for the non-technical user.

Familiar Features.
KMyMoney intends to provide all important features found in the commercially-available, personal finance managers. The current release is closer than ever to that goal and more improvements are already planned or being tested.
I've looked briefly at the Handbook. KMyMoney supports both traditional banking/budgeting needs as well as investment management needs. There's support for online security quotes, multiple currencies, etc. (However, "Certain common features that are normally found with investments are not yet implemented in KMyMoney. These include: Derivatives (options, futures, etc), capital gains, and tax reporting for investments.") Nevertheless it's on my to-do list to explore this software as an alternative to Quicken.
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Re: Quicken's future direction - a cause for concern

Post by Uncle Pennybags »

gator1 wrote: There are free alternatives.
Free like Google's stuff is "free"? No thank you. I see Excel for dummies in my future. I own Office 2016, the last forever no cloud needed Office.
NYCguy wrote:I love Quicken and upgrade every year but I do not like this development.
Quicken doesn't change much so the mandatory three year upgrade to be able to "Web Connect" is what I do. Lately I have had to ether manually enter transactions or manually download the "Web Connect" file. So are these "private capitol" thieves going to brick my 2015 Quicken? If so I can see why they want to be private and not let people know where they live.
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Re: Quicken's future direction - a cause for concern

Post by Kenkat »

Peculiar_Investor wrote:From Quicken Home & Business | Quicken they want CAD 89.99/year. This also removes retailers like Staples and Amazon from the places to purchase, so no "sale prices". $89.99/year seems outrageous to many.
Wow. Considering I am currently spending $40-60 USD every three years for Quicken Deluxe, $90 CAD / $70 USD seems like an obvious money grab. Definitely will push many to the exits, likely me as well. And I go back as well to the Quicken for DOS days.
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Re: Quicken's future direction - a cause for concern

Post by TVBogle »

student wrote:I never liked Quicken. I used Microsoft Money until it stopped updating stock quotes, then I switched to Quicken. For investment tracking, I use Personal Capital and Fidelity. (I don't give them my passwords, I manually entered the portfolio.) For expenses, I have gnucash.
I use MS Money (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/downloa ... x?id=20738) together with PocketSense scripts (https://sites.google.com/site/pocketsen ... moneyfixp1) to automatically download statements and stock quotes.
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Re: Quicken's future direction - a cause for concern

Post by student »

TVBogle wrote:
student wrote:I never liked Quicken. I used Microsoft Money until it stopped updating stock quotes, then I switched to Quicken. For investment tracking, I use Personal Capital and Fidelity. (I don't give them my passwords, I manually entered the portfolio.) For expenses, I have gnucash.
I use MS Money (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/downloa ... x?id=20738) together with PocketSense scripts (https://sites.google.com/site/pocketsen ... moneyfixp1) to automatically download statements and stock quotes.
Thanks.
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Re: Quicken's future direction - a cause for concern

Post by Peculiar_Investor »

kenschmidt wrote:
Peculiar_Investor wrote:From Quicken Home & Business | Quicken they want CAD 89.99/year. This also removes retailers like Staples and Amazon from the places to purchase, so no "sale prices". $89.99/year seems outrageous to many.
Wow. Considering I am currently spending $40-60 USD every three years for Quicken Deluxe, $90 CAD / $70 USD seems like an obvious money grab. Definitely will push many to the exits, likely me as well. And I go back as well to the Quicken for DOS days.
No kidding. Without knowing the data, I would suggest that most prudent Quicken users (or at least those of forums like this) amortize the Quicken price over the current three year sunset period of online services (i.e. download transactions). I cannot recall a Quicken feature release in probably the past decade that gave me the desire/need to upgrade. My three year upgrade cycle is 99% due to keep the ability to download transactions, thus saving me time and effort.

But I also see that as the catch-22 that Quicken is now trying to address. The subscription model itself isn't the problem as I see it. There are two main issues that I hope Quicken addresses. First and foremost, I object (strenuously object :D ) to Quicken's decision that if/when I stop paying the subscription fee then I can no longer enter manual transactions. That's the non-starter for me. Secondarily, the subscription cost is far too high for the benefit I'm receiving. In reality what I have been purchasing from Quicken and would continue to purchase is the online services (download transactions).

If they broke that out as a service fee/subscription that I could purchase and continue to use my existing software version, that would be the perfect solution for me. Quicken 2013 worked well for me and I would have stayed there if I could have purchased the right to continue to use online services. I upgraded to Quicken 2016 solely for to keep downloading transactions and have had to suffer through the Intuit ID hassle and the new bugs, particularly the "focus" bug that apparently has existing for a few releases and Quicken has shown no interest in fixing.

The discussion on the Quicken forum that I liked has generally been providing good feedback to Quicken and I'm happy to see a Quicken representative, Kathlyn, who's been involved in the discussion and answering questions. Hopefully something good comes out of this engagement. But the user base needs to make their voice(s) heard, hence the reason for this topic to raise awareness.
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Re: Quicken's future direction - a cause for concern

Post by Kenkat »

Completely agree with you Peculiar...why don't they sell the software for some reasonable price and then charge a subscription fee for online services - at some reasonable price like $20 per year?
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Re: Quicken's future direction - a cause for concern

Post by Strayshot »

Quicken has its user community by the short and curleys and they know it. The business trade they need to make is how much more $$$ can they make by alienating a large chunk of the existing user base but dramatically increasing revenue from the remainder and this sounds like a solution.

I for one feel the strong tug and will be drug along. As long as the product keeps doing its job, it honestly isn't worth the effort for me to switch. At a cost of maybe another $50-100 a year my time and legacy data are worth more than trying to switch to an alternative and mess things up or deal with any frustration.

Subscription-based "cloud" software is the direction of the market, you no longer "own" a static and installed local software package. You get Software as a service. I would much rather go this route than see quicken disappear altogether as a product.

I don't like it, but I have paid subscriptions to other services I don't like for my whole life (taxes via us citizenship) and have come to terms with the model.
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Re: Quicken's future direction - a cause for concern

Post by ruralavalon »

What are the better alternatives to Quicken, for someone who wants automatic downloads and just wants to monitor spending?
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Re: Quicken's future direction - a cause for concern

Post by Bylo Selhi »

Peculiar_Investor wrote:The subscription model itself isn't the problem as I see it. There are two main issues that I hope Quicken addresses. First and foremost, I object (strenuously object :D ) to Quicken's decision that if/when I stop paying the subscription fee then I can no longer enter manual transactions. That's the non-starter for me. Secondarily, the subscription cost is far too high for the benefit I'm receiving. In reality what I have been purchasing from Quicken and would continue to purchase is the online services (download transactions).
That's basically what I tried to say in the OP over at FWF. The hike in subscription fees is painful, but I could probably live with it just for the convenience of downloading data. The ransomware on my own data is objectionable and totally unacceptable. That's the show stopper for me. So instead of paying $90 for 2017, Quicken now loses that revenue from me indefinitely.

But there's a third problem they're trying to address. First some background. Quicken was a slowly dying business for Intuit. In part that was because of all the bugs that never got fixed. In part it was due to the slow introduction of useful, new features. In part it was because of their transition to the 3 year sunset cycle. The product only remained viable because there was a dearth of competition and because the inertia of moving elsewhere was quite high. Moreover what competition there was, e.g. GNUCash, had no marketing presence and was at least as hard to use as Quicken. So it was never a real threat. Eventually as revenues dwindled from attrition, Intuit decided to get rid of their presumably now least profitable product. They remain commited to financial software and services because they kept TurboTax, QuickBooks, Mint, etc. which by all media accounts are more lucrative.

The sale of the business to a private equity company (H.I.G Capital) is a classic discarded cigar butt with a puff left [as Buffett puts it] transaction. Hence the move to the subscription and ransomware business model. HIG wants to extract as much money out of us as quickly as possible, while spending as little as possible to keep the product alive.

My concern is that even if HIG reverses their decision on ransonware, the writing is on the wall. Quicken will continue to die a slow death as HIG tries to extract as much profit as they can from that last drag on their cigar butt.

It thus behooves us to find a viable alternative before that happens.
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Re: Quicken's future direction - a cause for concern

Post by gd »

For unrelated reasons, I experimented with Mint and PersonalCapital recently. My impression was that both were intended simply as consolidators, and did not allow (or with clumsy workarounds) unlinked accounts with manual entry, e.g. cash accounts or accounts for institutions that did not have working download info. Their report generation was crude at best. That means they're replacements for a subset of Quicken functionality only. Have I got this wrong?

If there are Quicken marketeers lurking, I'm a user since early 90's, track every penny of my finances with it since that time, and would drop it ASAP if I discovered they were restricting use of my purchased copy other than downloading-- regardless of a viable replacement. I'd make a final paper report for decades-old FIFO capital gains, export it every way I could think of, then shrug and consider myself free of the tyranny of compulsive financial tracking.
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Re: Quicken's future direction - a cause for concern

Post by nedsaid »

I don't think that Quicken has improved very much over the years. Pretty much change fonts and colors and rearrange things a bit to make people think things are different. It seems like they are just adding on to old code. I wonder if they need to rewrite the program from scratch and make it a truly modern program rather than piling code on an old one.
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Re: Quicken's future direction - a cause for concern

Post by Gryphon »

nedsaid wrote:I wonder if they need to rewrite the program from scratch and make it a truly modern program rather than piling code on an old one.
Careful what you wish for - it can be a slow process. They started rewriting the Mac version from scratch back in 2009 (with an initial release (Quicken Essentials) in 2010) and it has just recently gotten to the point where I could start using it again. I don't think they've quite restored all the features from the old version, but it's close enough for me at this point.
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Re: Quicken's future direction - a cause for concern

Post by Youngblood »

I enjoy Quicken 2017 very much. If only given the choice of a forced subscription and no manual entry if I don't comply I would quit. In that case, I don't believe Quicken would survive anyway.

This hasn't happened yet so I will just enjoy using Quicken until it does.

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Re: Quicken's future direction - a cause for concern

Post by masha12 »

TVBogle wrote:I use MS Money (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/downloa ... x?id=20738) together with PocketSense scripts (https://sites.google.com/site/pocketsen ... moneyfixp1) to automatically download statements and stock quotes.

I also still use the sunset edition of Microsoft Money. I like having the information on my computer because (1) it makes me the "final aribter of truth;" and (2) I can enter future transactions to plan for cash flow.

I've tried the scripts for downloading transactions but it never worked right for me (computers are not my thing), but I don't have that many account so it is not a big deal to download the bank and credit card statements once per month. And I developed the habit of not manually updating fund prices until the end of the year, which was nice for ignoring the daily ups and downs of the market.

In the last year, I've started using Personal Capital to get additional information about allocation and fund expenses, and there is a guy out there who used to work for Microsoft who sells a program for $10 to update prices in Money. I downloaded the free version and so far it has worked fine (you get 60 free updates to try it out).
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Re: Quicken's future direction - a cause for concern

Post by mtnlover »

I've been using Quicken for ages. I don't even know how long. But I stopped upgrading after the 2013 version b/c they were requiring use of online data and downloads, etc. I am distrustful of loading all my info into cyberspace. I am happy to manually enter my data. I'll continue to use my old version of Q on my home computer and backups. It gives me the year-end reports I need. If the computer dies unexpectedly I'll be SOL, but I'll cope. And I keep paper copies of statements, etc. (I know, very un-Bogelheadish). Too bad about Q.
TravelGeek
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Re: Quicken's future direction - a cause for concern

Post by TravelGeek »

Uncle Pennybags wrote:
gator1 wrote: There are free alternatives.
Free like Google's stuff is "free"? No thank you.
This. I use Google and I know I know that if I am not paying them, then I am not a customer - I am their product.

Intuit's Mint isn't free. They aren't a charity or open source software provider. Today they may not collect money from their users directly or perhaps indirectly if you never use one of their referral services, but as soon as they decide that they want more money you will pay or lose your "free" service.
Saving$
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Re: Quicken's future direction - a cause for concern

Post by Saving$ »

grandmacassie wrote:I've been using Quicken for ages....... I am distrustful of loading all my info into cyberspace. I am happy to manually enter my data...
This.
Bylo Selhi wrote:....There's a further wrinkle that in recent editions of Quicken your IntuitID (soon to be QuickenID) had to be validated by logging into their website every few months. That means that even if you keep all your data on local storage you may be locked out if you can't reach Quicken's servers or if Quicken decides to expire inactive IDs, etc.
Bogleheads: PLEASE advise which version this IntuitID business started.
I have never had to do this. Bought a copy of Q, loaded onto my computer, connected NOTHING to Q, enter all data manually, and click Cancel on every offer to "Update Quicken" or do online backup. I do NOT have an Intuit ID. My system works for my purposes. Reading the above I'd like to update to the latest version that will continue to allow me to operate as I have been operating.
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Re: Quicken's future direction - a cause for concern

Post by gator1 »

TravelGeek wrote:
Uncle Pennybags wrote:
gator1 wrote: There are free alternatives.
Free like Google's stuff is "free"? No thank you.
This. I use Google and I know I know that if I am not paying them, then I am not a customer - I am their product.

Intuit's Mint isn't free. They aren't a charity or open source software provider. Today they may not collect money from their users directly or perhaps indirectly if you never use one of their referral services, but as soon as they decide that they want more money you will pay or lose your "free" service.
To each their own. I will keep using my free, err excuse me . . . . "free" . . . . Personal Capital that provides me with everything Quicken provided me. Just out of curiosity, do you use a "free" email provider?

Free
adverb
1. without cost or payment.

So, "Intuit's Mint isn't free" isn't factual, is it?
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Bylo Selhi
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Re: Quicken's future direction - a cause for concern

Post by Bylo Selhi »

Saving$ wrote:I have never had to do this. Bought a copy of Q, loaded onto my computer, connected NOTHING to Q, enter all data manually, and click Cancel on every offer to "Update Quicken" or do online backup. I do NOT have an Intuit ID. My system works for my purposes. Reading the above I'd like to update to the latest version that will continue to allow me to operate as I have been operating.
What version (year) of Quicken are you using? The IntuitID was introduced only in the last few years.
TravelGeek
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Re: Quicken's future direction - a cause for concern

Post by TravelGeek »

gator1 wrote: To each their own. I will keep using my free, err excuse me . . . . "free" . . . . Personal Capital that provides me with everything Quicken provided me. Just out of curiosity, do you use a "free" email provider?


I use "free" email providers (Yahoo and Gmail) for certain needs, such as registering for forums like this. I consider them to essentially be disposable.

I do pay for my main email service. It is a domain I registered 20 years ago and own, and it thus easily movable to another provider (or I could move it "on premises" if I wanted to). The service provides free (I don't charge them) accounts for many family members, too.

As for your (or Google's) definition of free... I like the example they give (that you omitted).

without cost or payment.
"ladies were admitted free"
Erwin
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Re: Quicken's future direction - a cause for concern

Post by Erwin »

Can you not use Quicken for perpetuity if you enter the data manually?
Erwin
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Re: Quicken's future direction - a cause for concern

Post by dumbbunny »

If I had to subscribe to Quicken (or any personal finance program) I would stop using it. I have been a Quicken user since 1990 and currently use Quicken 2007. It's the only reason I still use my 2007 Macbook 10.6.8. and one of these days I suspect that computer will crash and burn. I am considering creating a detailed transaction report and using Excel so I can use my 2012 Mac Mini for tracking.
“It’s the curse of old men to realize that in the end we control nothing." "Homeland" episode, "Gerontion"
Saving$
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Re: Quicken's future direction - a cause for concern

Post by Saving$ »

Bylo Selhi wrote:
Saving$ wrote:I have never had to do this. Bought a copy of Q, loaded onto my computer, connected NOTHING to Q, enter all data manually, and click Cancel on every offer to "Update Quicken" or do online backup. I do NOT have an Intuit ID. My system works for my purposes. Reading the above I'd like to update to the latest version that will continue to allow me to operate as I have been operating.
What version (year) of Quicken are you using? The IntuitID was introduced only in the last few years.
2010

I'd like to know the year IntuitID was introduced so I can buy the previous year.
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bzargarcia
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Re: Quicken's future direction - a cause for concern

Post by bzargarcia »

I would pay a reasonable price for a subscription model (maybe around $20-$25 a year). Personal Capital has not worked for me since USAA implemented two factor authentication. Mint had the same trouble a few years ago. I can go back to a Excel or Numbers spreadsheet, but it isn't as valuable or useful.
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Re: Quicken's future direction - a cause for concern

Post by MarkBarb »

I wish that it was cheaper, but I'm happier with a subscription model than I would be if they followed the path of Microsoft Money and ceased to exist. I think they are searching for a business model that keeps them viable. At some price point, I'll quit and switch to something like Mint and spreadsheets. For me, $90/year would be an annoying price increase, but probably not enough to make it worth the effort to switch away. It doesn't have to save me much time to justify that cost.

I'm sure that they are working hard to figure out what price point will maximize their revenue - trading off between more money per subscriber and a loss of subscribers. Software isn't an easy business. If you want ongoing development, the vendor needs a stream of revenue to fund it. I'd be happier if they had a huge user base and found that $20/year was the profit maximizing price, but only time will tell. Honestly, I'd prefer that they just fund minimal development and support and keep the price down. The new features and emphasis on mobile haven't really benefited me much.
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Kevin M
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Re: Quicken's future direction - a cause for concern

Post by Kevin M »

Stopped using Quicken years ago since I found it to be a royal pain, and I used only a small subset of the features. I had used it for many years before finally cutting the cord. I have never missed it. Used Mint for awhile, but now don't even bother with that.

Kevin
If I make a calculation error, #Cruncher probably will let me know.
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