Mint.com
I’ve used Microsoft Money to track my finances for…years now. Maybe 2002. I’d have to dig around old cds to figure it out.
In any case, it wasn’t really a conscious decision. I think I got a free copy with a new computer or something along those lines. I had been using Quicken for much the same reason for a year or so prior to making the switch, but I didn’t really feel strongly one way or another. I just wanted to try and get a handle on how a person could be taking in so much money (relative to an average college student’s income) and still not have anything.
Never did figure that out.
Time went on, and I found out about Microsoft and Quicken’s little ploy. The first hit can be free, but you’ll pay us every year/other year to continue to watch all of your money circle the drain.
And I did. I’ve bought all the upgrades that have come out for Microsoft Money from 2002 onwards. The good ones and the really really bad ones.
Wesabe.com
Every year I went through the same song and dance. Sometime around August or September, Quicken and Microsoft would announce new versions of their software. Reputable (and unreputable) news sources would go out and review them, diving into the details, dissecting the differences, and inevitably telling the world: They’re just about the same, but this year we’re giving the prize to….
Every year I would mull over the reviews and try to think…is it worth switching? Should I go to Quicken? I’m using TurboTax now, so wouldn’t that integrate better? Blah blah blah.
Every year it got a little harder. That’s what years of transactions will do to you: they sap your courage. They drain your spirit of adventure. I’ve had friends who made the switch in one direction or the other. The horror stories are not worth repeating.
This year…this year my heart broke a little bit. Microsoft announced that they were getting out of the personal financial software market altogether. Despite having decent software and fighting the industry leader tooth and nail, they decided to throw in the towel. As of June something or another, they would stop selling their software altogether. All current online services (the ones that allow you to automatically sync with your bank) would cease sometime in 2011. Users were faced with the choice of letting their online subscriptions lapse or buying the same software they already had in order to get another two years in.
I actually opted to let my service lapse. Quicken had quickly posted a spot on their website that they had entered into intense negotiations with the Microsoft Money team to unlock the secrets of their data file to allow users to import…everything to the new version of Quicken once it came out. Additionally, in the past few years there had been a serious rise in the number and quality of Online Personal Finance Software…such as Wesabe or Mint or even Quicken Online. They weren’t perfect, and most of them were missing major features. But a person could get by.
Yodlee Moneycenter
I had been playing around in the back of my mind with taking a two-prong strategy: waiting for the new release of Quicken and hoping that their new and improved import utility would be up to snuff, allowing me to keep my years of transactional history, and playing around with the online services. Even though they were not as fully featured as desktop software, they did have an advantage of nearly instant knowledge of your financial picture at all time. It was all web-based. Almost all of them had iPhone apps. And they could only get better, really. Who knows…maybe they were working on their own import utility. Maybe someday I would drop desktop software altogether and just trust in the aether.
Recently I had kind of settled on one particular service: Mint. Actually, I think that most everyone had settled on that service. Of all the online offerings, it was the prettiest and the most automatic. Some services like Wesabe had mechanisms that approached automation, but still required a bit of manual labor in order to upload recent transactions into the site. Mint grabbed everything it could whenever it could. Which was nice.
Just as I was seriously entertaining ideas of skipping the switch to the quicken desktop software altogether, new news hit the wires: Intuit bought Mint. (Intuit makes Quicken)
You might be wondering why this would be anything but a good thing. After all, I was considering moving my desktop component to Quicken anyways. And every press release has state any number of times that Mint will remain, and remain free.
The question is…will it be as good? If a person reads around for opinions on Quicken for long enough, you’ll discover one thing very quickly: there is a very loud and sizeable crowd of haters out there. They don’t like the releases made in the last few years. They think that the customer service is terrible. Worst of all, they think that the company’s online offering, Quicken Online, sucks.
Take that into consideration along with some of the announcements made by the companies: Both Mint and Quicken Online will remain active. Quicken Online will couple more closely with the desktop software. Mint will remain strictly a personal finance tool.
So…how will they coexist, I wonder? My fear is that some functionality…important functionality like being able to enter transactions manually in Mint and then having the auto load reconcile, will just be left out of the product. Mint will become a personal finance toy, with all feature requests by its user base being met by the response, “Have you tried Quicken? It seamlessly integrates with Quicken Online, which will give you the same instant access to you current state of affairs, all for only the low low cost of…”
My thoughts tell me the answer lies in using Mint’s competitors like Wesabe or Yodlee or…well, there’s probably a half-dozen. But now I have the same problem I had with Money once it was obvious I was going to have to leave it…I’ve got history with Mint. I’ve got budgets and categories and what not.
What’s a person to do?
