Wells Fargo Is Charging Me $10 to Use Quicken!

You've got to check the payments in any case. Whether you do it after payment with automated pay or before by doing it in Quicken seems not to be much different.

More likely he just guessed right this time. Timing the market is a strategy that no noe has done consistently

I'd suggest reading "The Investor's Manifesto" and see how easy it is to beat the market with virtually no effort. And it's not another charlatan with "methods" to get rich. It's all based on the academic research in financial economics.

The first step is to fire your broker.

Obviously mental health treatments are costly, in your area. YOU being the evidence of that statement.

We agree on that observation. I consider "market timing" to be overly risky.

The broker ALWAYS gets his cut, no matter how much the market sucks. Time that brokers were only paid commissions RETROACTIVELY for investments that GAINED in value.

Guys (and gals??) -

OK - enough! Some threads in this forum between people who know a lot about Quicken choose to use the tool and organize their financial lives the way they see fit. One makes one's case with logical arguments (as they see it), and if you don't/can't convince the mainstays here that you way is better, drop it. This thread is becoming tiresome and some people's old habits are beginning to come back in terms of language and tone.

Some people put everything on auto pilot, some folks like doing everything manually. Some are in the middle. There's no right and wrong way here.

Let's cool it.

(Han: Totally off topic - Check the GPS forum about my post about Rt 128 and the 'real' name!)

snipped-for-privacy@nada.com wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:

I know it is easy for me to say this, as I haven't experienced anything like that. But, you must have gotten a statement saying $275.55 was due. With that, I'd called the bank and told them the withdrawal was fraudulent, and they were accessories to the fraud. I would have also immediately called the payee and told them they were responsible for fixing their mistake as of yesterday. This is unconscionable and the perpetrators of the error are responsible.

"Andrew" wrote in news:4e183471$0$23620$ snipped-for-privacy@cv.net:

Andrew, I don't see it. Which GPS "forum" do you mean? I had a crash, andmaybe I was subscribed to another newsgroup that I forgot about.

You, and everyone else, are always free to disagree with me and explain why you think you are right and I am wrong. But as far as I'm concerned, you re *not* free to do so as rudely as you just did.

So this is the end of the conversation. I won't argue with you, and won't read any more of your messages. You are now killfiled.

My payees are all set up at the bank. I can even see the last payment that I made, to verify the amount and date. I just go to the list, and copy the amount into the payment field. If I have multiple payments, I copy them all, then press submit.

Yes, it is easier to let Quicken do all the work, but once the amounts are verified and entered, there is very little extra work to pay through the bank web page, and I know the amounts are valid before the transaction is executed.

As others have said, you do it your way. I'll do it my way. I won't respond on this thread again.

Yes, my broker was getting 1% of my account balance every year. At one point, that was $7,000 per year. For that, he had me buying Country Wide just prior to the crash. He said that if things got nasty in the housing market, that was the company that would clean up. They did, but I sure didn't get any of it. I am now a part of the class action, but I'll bet I don't get $.01 on the dollar.

When I closed the account, he had the nerve to tell me how well the account had done the year before. I explained that it didn't matter because all the gains were gone. He just didn't get it.

Of course it is but I did all that and they simply dragged their feet. It's not a crime. I checked. Filing a civil suit would take even longer and cost more than it was worth.

Thanks for the detailed cogent argument. Who could argue with someone so rational.

It's more than overly risky. It simply isn't better than throwing darts over the long run.

Virtually all active traders fail to beat the market over any significant period of time, whether they "time" the market, or pick the securities.

What he got was provably a new car or a boat. Ask him where the customers yachts are.

You don't need some guy to claim to know what's the better stock or investment based on security specific research. It doesn't yield better results over the long term than much simpler, virtually free strategies. The problem is that virtually all specific security risk can be diversified away so you are then left only with market risk.

Modern financial economists have done tons of research on various strategies and only a handful, and a very small one at that, actually beat the market over the long haul and none of them involve timing the market or picking stocks.

There are several excellent books on the subject, that vary from simple instruction to very detailed, mathematical explanation. The simplest is "The Investment Answer" (82 pages). One of the most detailed is "The Intelligent Asset Allocator". The one striking a happy medium for most people I know is "The Investor's Manifesto".

I do have a "investment advisor" but use the methods in the books. He does not recommend anything specific and I trade something every couple of years. His fee is fixed and comes to about 0.0625% based on my portfolio, and what I get that I can't get for free is access to institutional things like DFA mutual funds and no-load access to some that otherwise have a load.

I've done this for thirty years and never lost a nights sleep.

The retail broker is a pariah, typically helping you do worse that throwing darts at the WSJ and getting a fee for doing it. Active traders do not beat the market over the long term. Even if you paid them for the gains, you'd be worse off that otherwise, because it's easy to do better on your own even if you paid them nothing. Their advice has negative value.

Heck that is worth a fortune in itself. I'll check out the books you recommended. Thanks.

I'm with you. No major company I've ever dealt with makes as many errors as I do. I hate the phone company, but its the customer service that is deficient -- their bills are perfectly error-free. (If the quality of the signal my cable company delivered to my house was as perfect as it's billing system, I'd be a happier customer of theirs, too.)

I'm over 60, and watch my transactions like a hawk, and in all those years I've only once or twice been billed an incorrect amount. I *have* had disputes with vendors, but that's a different matter, and my credit card company has always taken my side and charged back the merchant.

I've also found a few tricks to save fees. I need to regularly move some money from one of my banks to another. The sending bank wants to charge a couple of bucks to push money to another bank, but the second bank charges nothing to pull money from the first! I think this is the same principal behind what you were describing: ask your bank about bill-paying - sending funds -- and they'll be inclined to charge you for the "service". But ask a creditor to go fetch their own payment from your bank, and they'll happily do it for free.

Doug