Hello all, I just ran across this ng and I guess I am curious how you guys use Quicken. When I was using it, albeit an older version than 2007, I found it difficult to use and to set up. I had my bank and credit card accounts input to it, but could not get them to update correctly most of the time. I had to do all the updates/downloads manually, and frankly, quit using it because it took way too much time for what little it helped. If you care to, can you maybe share your experience with this software and why you use it, and does it occupy a lot of your time? I found I could keep track of everything much easier than taking the time to have it imported into Quicken just by checking the individual websites. Anyway, thanks for your insight ahead of time. Maybe you can inspire me to try it at least one more time. B
I've been using it for at least 10 years, and have gone through several "upgrades". I started because we had to watch our money closely, not having a lot of it, and I got tired of the old way of writing everything on column paper. I don't know why I didn't try a spreadsheet, or maybe I did and realized that Quicken would do the same thing without all the programming and setup.
I have cash, checking, savings, at least 5 retirement accounts, several credit cards, two house loans, and several assets entered. Each couple of days my wife or I enter our purchases which takes only minutes. Many bills are fixed and scheduled, others are not fixed amount but are scheduled to prompt me (like utilities).
I used to reconcile with paper statements, but this year started using the banks' quicken history download which is way easier. This is especially true for the retirement accounts, they have so much fiddly activity that I never tracked it my hand. As a result I can't get an accurate ROI for most mutual funds. Now that I'm downloading the quicken file those accounts will be accurate.
I don't use Quicken bill pay, preferring to do this with my bank.
The last few years the updates haven't added much usefulness. They seem to be mere revenue generators, which they probably need, but I wish they'd make genuine improvements. I don't buy a new Quicken every year, only every 2 or 3 years. In particular the reports are somewhat lame and inflexible. As an engineer I'm used to more flexibility in analysis and output formats.
I have been using Quicken for 10+ years and find Quicken extraordinarily useful. Currently I am running Quicken 2001. I have never done any downloads directly into Quicken, preferring to enter things myself from my various statements. At the end of very month I update all my stock prices by downloading the prices from Yahoo into a spreadsheet, saving the spreadsheet info in a form that Quicken can import, and then importing the prices into Quicken.
I enter all securities transactions so that the Portfolio View is correct. It is so nice to be able to see the status and contents of all investment accounts on any date. All my credit card and checking account activity gets entered. Most of my cash transactions are also entered. My wife does not find Quicken to be as useful as I do. She grudgingly enters most of her transactions, but not with the detail I do. E.g if I pay for a meal at a restaurant I always enter the name of the restaurant, the amount, the proper category, and a memo (e.g. lunch with Bill in Boulder). My wife, on the other hand, has eaten many, many times at restaurants all named Lunch, no memo.
Quicken is always great to have at tax time. Quicken can generate capital gains data that can be imported by Tax programs like TaxCut and TurboTax. That is a great time saver. Since my charitable donations are entered into Quicken I can print a nice hardcopy Quicken report of those donations and then use that hardcopy to enter them into a tax program.
Quicken has a much better memory than I have. Just today I used the Quicken "find" capability to recall what it was I bought a couple of years ago from a local store. I wanted to get that item again, but without Quicken's memory I could not remember the item.
If you put some effort into setting up and maintaining your Quicken database you can get a lot out of it. But, if you don't enter all your information into Quicken, if most of your transaction have the "misc" category, if all your restaurants are named "Lunch", if all the memo fields are blank, if your securities prices are not updated regularly, then Quicken will, most likely, not be very useful to you.
An interesting post .. someone said "I use Quicken because I don't have much money and I have to take care of it" .. my reason is the opposite, but oddly it suits us both. The original DOS character version I got (1992 or so) had no download, so when Quicken issued a VISA with download I got one .. from there Chase Bank, where I had accounts also had a download. These were all private lines, so the biggest change came when download was replaced by an Internet connection making it 'free' so to speak. Now, I download daily from 7 institutions, I suppose Quicken has replaced PC games like Tetris. JACL
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