Suggest an Alternative to Quicken Personal Financial Management Software

In My Humble Opinion
1

Greetings once again to the assembled sages of Der Dope.

Seems like every year I get bent over a piano bench by the Intuit Software Corporation, an experience that I do not relish. OS conflicts with Quicken 98, Y2K problems with Quicken 99, almost yearly problems with Quicktax. And NOW, they have stopped supporting bank downloads for Q2001. dirty rotten razza frazza frippin grippin…

I am loath to share with these turkeys any more of my hard earned dough. Yes, one must expect to pay for good software in most cases, but the almost yearly upgrades coupled with several crappy and/or costly customer service experiences have soured me on this product. I do some noodling on a Linux box in my spare time (hah!) and have come across an opensource product called Gnucash, which seems pretty dandy, but I think there would be adoption resistance to the other members of 'Vark Vineyards, Inc. (i.e. my wife doesn’t want to futz with the Linux machine).

Can anyone recommend a PC based alternative to Quicken? MS Money is perhaps the most obvious choice but (1) I have seen it slagged on this board on a couple of occasions and (2) Mr. Bill doesn’t really need my money anyway. Independents/Shareware solutions are of particular interest.

thanks in advance,
'vark

p.s. on the off chance that someone is paying an inordinate amount of attention to my posting history, I did endorse Quicken in a previous thread mainly due to a relatively pain free experience over the last couple of years. Now that they have taken away my bank downloads, however, and want to go to a monthly service plan model, the gloves are off (Droppin’ dah Coopers, as my buddy from Labrador City likes to say).

2

I dunno… Galena and I use MS Money, and I’m pretty impressed with it. Of course, I also think that a lot of people hate MS and don’t even know why. :slight_smile:

I’ve never used a version of Quicken, though, so I can’t really give a good comparison to your current software.
LilShieste

3

I’ve recently started using Quicken, and find it surprisingly hard to use and poorly designed. I’ll follow this thread with interest to see what people say about alternatives, especially if at some point I’m no longer able to download bank information.

4

Oh, I forgot to mention:

We bank through USBank; aka Firstar, aka Mercantile aka…

MS Money works really well with downloading our bank info from the website, and a surprisingly good job categorizing it too.
LilShieste

5

Don’t know what to recommend - I’m watching because I grow to like Quicken less and less every year - started using it in '88.

Version 2003 is running correctly for me - what I hate is that there are ads all over it, and I can’t find out how to get rid of them. The help system only covers topics like “How do I get out of debt?” I know how to get out of debt, and it doesn’t involve all these little ads, and it DEFINITELY doesn’t involve having my internet connection fire up on half the things I try clicking - I want their damn mitts off my money, they already got the purchase price, and what could be worse about financial management software than having it skim some off the top???