Quicken - Personal Finance Software

Mint used to work great for us but it's gotten progressively worse.

 

I've not used Mint myself, but had a colleague who did. I may hit him up to see if he still likes it. As far as alternatives, not super helpful here I'm afraid.

But good luck on finding one.

 

I like Mint as an overall account aggregator and for very high level trends, but its transasction categorization is crap and requires a lot of maintenance to be useful. I also don't understand why but it's not unusual for the descriptions it ends up with for odds and ends to be indecipherable which has me going back to the original account to try figure out what I'm looking at.

 

I think I've been using Quicken for over 20-25 years now. lol. In my current file I still have transactions from 2009, probably. I really need to clean that crap out or archive it.

My finances are pretty simple, so I only use it for paying bills and a general "what're we looking like this month?" type of information. I used Personal Capital online just for giggles in case I wanted to switch away from Quicken at some point. Personal Captial is what "became" Empower. I don't use it for much of anything anymore, so I can't compare it to Quicken much.

The only issue I have with Quicken nowadays is that it's become a yearly subscription and a lot of its connectivity with banks seem to break every year or get worse. Other than paying bills from one place, I'm not sure what else I use it for, and I can do that other places, too. Well, I do like the fact I can keep all my finances locally instead of shoving everything into the "cloud".

 

I'm really not a huge fan of Empower's software...doesn't connect to as much as Mint. Mint does have a lot of manual reclassing that needs to be done. Empower is the same way.

Empower will call you a lot to try to sell you on their investment services (financial advisor).

 

I've been using Mint since like 2010. It's pretty invaluable to my financial planning. Yes, it has gotten progressively worse over the years, but that's the free service model in a nutshell.

I've heard good things about Empower, but I'm not compelled enough to make a change.

There's also YNAB but that's a paid service.

 

Yeah, this is a good point. I did get a few calls from them in the past few years I gave them my info, but I never answer. I haven't gotten a call in a while, now that I think about it.

 

Sorry in advance for resurrecting this thread. I am looking for recommendations for budget planning software that does not require my data to exist on the cloud. Has anyone here tried Moneydance? Is it legit?

 

****. I've been dreading this day.

 

So I signed up for Simplifi and Monarch.

Hated Simplifi, liking Monarch a lot so far.

The only problem for me is that Monarch's budgeting is a bit noisy compared to Mint.

Normally I would budget out all of my known/expected recurring expenses every month, and everything else I would put into a big "discretionary spending" bucket.

Monarch wants you to budget every-single-thing out line by line... kinda clunky.