Money program for home. Mint or Gnuchas?

[Eric Franklin]

I think the days of personal financial software installed on your computer is fading rapidly.

Services like Mint are where things are going and after using Mint, it would be hard to go back. The only item I am missing are the saving goals.

I was hesitate at first with using Mint because of the security concerns but I got over quickly. They encrypt all your data and they can't change your financial data, they just read it.

I would trust having my data at Mint with a good password versus Quicken or similar program data sitting on a laptop unencrypted. If the laptop was stolen, it would be relativity easy to get that data if the drive and/or file wasn't encrypted.

[Dave Lehnert]

Dave,

We use a very old Basic version of Quicken. I hope we don't have to update when I replace this computer.

My bookkeeper/CFO ....she is not too computer literate....and she has very little patience.

It took me years to convince her to use Quicken to find and correct problems with the checkbook. I don't even want to think I'll have to do it again for a new version or have to take over balancing the checkbook myself!

In reading the reviews on quicken, users are upset about their "sunset policy" The program is rigged so you have to by a new updated software after 3 years.

[Matt Meiser]

A lot of software is going that way. Look at all the Antivirus packages for a perfect example. Microsoft did the same with Money a few years ago too. I don't think the banks were all that happy about having to support a multitude of versions either. At one point our bank offered to reimburse us for buying the latest version of money.

[Rob Bodenschatz]

I used Quicken from 1992 through 2007. Switched to MS Money in 2007 and then back to Quicken a few months ago. Just went through something that might interest Quicken users.

I was having a problem with corrupted categories. Quicken has a "cleanup process" but I've been told that it won't work when your data file size reaches 15-20MB. Once that size is hit, there is a very high probability of data corruption (all data, not just categories) and there's nothing you can do about it except delete data to make the file size smaller. Don't know about you but I'm not willing to do that. I report on older transactions for trending reasons. I consider the amount of transactions I enter to be pretty average & it took 7-8 years to hit that limit. Like me, if you have a significant number of transactions, you are probably sitting on a time bomb.

BTW, this information is not published anywhere but I confirmed with multiple Quicken resources.

Oh, and Quicken customer service is about the worst I have ever dealt with.

[paul cottingham]

Oh, and Quicken customer service is about the worst I have ever dealt with.

Amen to that. And they charge plenty for it too.

[Jim Becker]

Quicken does own Mint.

What is your opinion on the security of using Mint?

I've honestly never looked at it since I'm a happy Quicken customer.