Why Not to Use Quicken and MS Money for Your Personal Finance Needs
There are two major professional personal finance packages, which are Microsoft Money and Quicken. They both have very similar functionality, with a little bit different interfaces. They both track expenditures, watch your investments, help you set goals, and the like.
Some people successfully use these programs to manage their financial lives, but for 95% of individuals, these software packages are simply over kill. It's like trying to get rid of dandelions by uprooting the entire lawn. Quick and Microsoft Money have become so enriched with widgets and un-needed functionality that they're no longer intuitive to operate for the average user. The amount of time that one has to invest just to learn the product well makes it not worth while when a simple spreadsheet would suffice.
If one spent a decent amount of time investigating either of these applications and all of their intricate tools and utilities, one could make very good use of it. However unless you need some of the advanced functionalities such as interfacing with your bank electronically, in most cases it's just easier for someone to make a simple spreadsheet, or have someone who's a bit more tech savvy make one for you. If you finances are very simple and you don't know a lot about computers, there's no reason you can't make up your monthly budget on a yellow pad.
These programs aren't free either. You'll have to fork over $29.99 for this years edition of Microsoft Money, or $39.99 for a copy of Quicken Personal Finance Deluxe. Of course they come out with a new version each year, so it's not a simple one-time fee either.
I decided to give both of these programs the benefit of the doubt, tried to use them to do a monthly budget, but all I've found were interfaces that are unintuitive, wasted time without really any results, random application crashes, and more confusion. When you consider that most people can do everything they need without one of these fancy applications, the cost of purchasing these applications, as well as the learning curve to make good use of these software applications, it just doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
Published by Matthew Paulson
I am a very busy undergraduate, I'm involved with nine different campus organizations and work five different jobs. Most notably, I am the editor-in-chief of DSU's Trojan Times. View profile
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4 Comments
Post a CommentI use mint.com its free and safe.
also read Potencial Millonario, the book.
I used to run a budget for NNSA ( A government agency) pertaining to local operations. I used Quicken there as well as at home. Home use was very simply- - Quicken Basic (no fancy stuff used) However, the Quicken Delux version was used quite nicely at work. It made budget presentations seem like childs play. So, depending on what one needs, Quicken does have a program for it. One dosen't have to up-date every year either to the newest and neatest program. My daughter is still using a 2006 Basic and just loves it and dosen't feel the need to up-grade to a newer version iregardless of my insistence that she at least up-grade to the 2010 version.
I used to run a budget for NNSA ( A government agency) pertaining to local operations. I used Quicken there as well as at home. Home use was very simply- - Quicken Basic (no fancy stuff used) However, the Quicken Delux version was used quite nicely at work. It made budget presentations seem like childs play. So, depending on what one needs, Quicken does have a program for it. One dosen't have to up-date every year either to the newest and neatest program. My daughter is still using a 2006 Basic and just loves it and dosen't feel the need to up-grade to a newer version iregardless of my insistence that she at least up-grade to the 2010 version.
Just because a program has lots of features and widgets doesn't mean you have to use them. I print out a checklist of monthly bills (yes, on paper) with the name of the bill, the amount, the date it's due, whether it's auto drafted from my account or I have to go online to make a payment and a box to check when it's paid.
But I also use (and have used for many years) Quicken to keep track of my checking account. The interface looks very much like a paper check register with spaces for the date, check number, pay to the order of, amount and other spaces. We put each entry into a category so we can have a general idea of where the money goes, but that isn't required. We also use our monthly bank statement to reconcile our account, it's a very simple process that usually takes much less time than trying to reconcile a paper register.
And that's all we use. We don't use the other features because we don't need them and we don't upgrade each year. Just because the publisher puts