Possible replacement for Quicken

Question

I have been using quicken to track my financial life for about 10 years now and am generally happy with it. A couple of years back Intuit changed the ability to download stock quotes for 2 years maximum. After that 2 years you need to buy the next version of Quicken. Not cool since the features I use have not changed in about 5 years. So my time to renew is coming up in a few months and I need to determine if I can use something else of just buy Quicken again.

Here are the main things I use Quicken for:

• Schedule bills and deposits in the calendar view so I can keep an eye on cash flow.
• Track all my stock and mutual fund investments across numerous accounts.
• I manually enter all my transactions so I can keep control of them. I just reconcile what I entered into Quicken based on the statements sent to me. I do not use Quicken's bill pay.
• I categorize all my expenditures for help come tax time.
• I use numerous reports including. Net Worth tracking, Cash not is retirement funds and total retirement savings.

My question is there any other tools (online or not) that would allow me to replace Quicken and not miss a beat? If I could import my Quicken data that would be a bonus.

I was interested in mint.com until Quicken bought them. Now I am not sure if they're any different then Quicken. Thoughts?

Answer 1

I would investigate mint.com further. Plenty of people have written off using them because Intuit purchased them, but that seems like cutting of your nose to spite your face.

I think mint.com is worth it for its Trends functionality alone, not to mention its automatic categorization of your purchases, reminders when bills are due, notifications of increased credit card interest rates, and overdraft notices.

I don't think mint.com schedules bills & deposits, but it tracks stocks & mutual fund investments and compares your portfolio returns against Dow Jones, S&P 500, or NASDAQ if you wish. I'm not sure I see the advantage of manual transaction entry, but you can add cash or check transactions manually. As I mentioned earlier, automated categorization is a great feature. In addition, you can tag certain transactions as reimbursable or tax-related.

If the primary feature you're interested in is stock quotes, maybe something like Yahoo Finance or Google Finance will be enough.

Answer 2

Given your needs, GNUcash will do swimmingly. I've used it for the past 3 years and while it's a gradual learning process, it's been able to resolve most stuff I've thrown at it.

Schedule bills and deposits in the calendar view so I can keep an eye on cash flow.

GNUcash has scheduled payments and receipts and reconcilation, should you need them. I prefer to keep enough float to cover monthly expenses in accounts rather than monitor potential shortfalls.

Track all my stock and mutual fund investments across numerous accounts.

It pulls stock, mutual and bond quotes from lots of places, domestic and foreign. It can also pull transaction data from your brokers, if they support that.

I manually enter all my transactions so I can keep control of them. I just reconcile what I entered into Quicken based on the statements sent to me. I do not use Quicken's bill pay

There's a reconciliation mode, but I don't use it personally. The purpose of reconcilation is less about catching bank errors and more about agreeing on the truth so that you don't incur bank fees. When I was doing this by hand I found I had a terrible data entry error rate, but on the other hand, the bayesian importer likes to mark gasoline purchases from the local grocery store as groceries rather than gas.

I categorize all my expenditures for help come tax time.

GNUcash has accounts, and you can mark expense accounts as tax related. It also generates certain tax forms for you if you need that. Not sure what all you're categorizing that's helpful at tax time though.

I use numerous reports including. Net Worth tracking, Cash not is retirement funds and total retirement savings.

Tons of reports, and the newest version supports SQL backends if you prefer that vs their reports.

Answer 3

It has a bit of a learning curve, but I like GNU Cash. (And since it open source, it's free!)

Answer 4

Do you use any other online features of Quicken? How many unique ticker symbols do you have? How often do you really need to update the prices? You can always continue to use Quicken, and enter the stock prices by hand. Maybe update them once a month to get an idea of how your investments are doing. That should work indefinitely.