Along with my monthly checking and savings account statement, I received the following notice in the mail:
Important Message for Personal Account Holders Who Use Quicken, QuickBooks, or Microsoft Money
Beginning April 1, 2007, a monthly fee of $5.95 will be assessed if you access Wachovia Online Banking directly from within your personal financial management software such as Quicken, QuickBooks, or Microsoft Money.
This monthly fee does not apply if you download your personal account information from wachovia.com into personal financial management software or if you have a Crown Select, Crown Classic, Crown Banking, Crown Access, Crown Regular, Crown Interest, Custom Banking, Performance Banking or Command Asset Program account.
The notice also says that by upgrading to one of the listed account types, I can avoid the $5.95 fee. When I originally upgraded to Quicken 2007, I was no longer able to connect directly to Wachovia using the software. While I’ve fixed the problem, now I always download my activity by logging into my account on wachovia.com. As long as I continue to do so, I won’t be charged the $5.95 monthly fee.
This is an example of Quicken’s high cost to the banks being passed onto the consumer — banks have to pay Intuit to support Quicken’s file format.
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Well, this is really annoying. But I suppose I’m not in love with Wachovia anyway. It sounds like you can go and fetch your download without a fee, but I think this will drive me to pull out more cash from the ATM instead of using my debit card for everything. I used to love the debit card/Quicken download, but I’m finding as time passes, Quicken wants me to use their service and I’m less and less thrilled with them. Their forecasting feature was great in the basic version back in 1996. Now it’s offered in the Deluxe package but it doesn’t seem to work as well as it used to. (Maybe partly because I have weird stuff going on with a mortgage now with transfers from one account to the other, etc.)
Quicken is overshooting. There are easier ways to manage your money more effectively, for less time, and less money.
We’re in beta right now to be able to import Quicken’s format (.qfx) and the more standard (free) .ofx format.
It’ll require you to go to the site and download, just as you do now Flexo. So this is actually good news for me. Quicken is forcing banks to pay, who are in turn forcing the consumer to pay.
As I read your post I was afraid you were going to come down against Wachovia. I’m happy to see that you understand how Quicken has been taking advantage of banks and I’d like to see more of them take a stand on this.
About 3 years ago Bank of America started to charge me 10$ per month for Quicken access!! I went in and asked them to remove the fee, which they wouldn’t, so I canceled my account and moved my money to UMB bank which does not charge for Quicken access. I do all my banking on-line, and only use a teller to deposit checks (very rarely). For them to keep my business it costs them whatever quicken charges them, especially since they offer no interest on my checking account and a piddly interest on my savings account.
I’m with THC. This is dirty little secret of Quicken that doesn’t show on the box, and how they REALLY make money.
Many leaner banks like credit unions can’t afford such fees and don’t offer access at any price. Doesn’t BofA charge too? It’s also why I don’t use Quicken.
“This is an example of Quicken’s high cost to the banks being passed onto the consumerâ€â€?banks have to pay Intuit to support Quicken’s file format.”
This doesn’t explain how you can still manually download the Quicken web connect for free. Obviously they are supporting this file format for no charge.
Until now I thought the bank pocketed the fees. It’s hard to imagine Intuit charging monthly fees as high as $5-10 per user in licensing. Banks, OTOH, can charge for a “service”. Still, between manual downloads and automated access there is no more capacity or infrastructure needed other than simply allowing access to Quicken on behalf of the user.
The $5.95 just showed up on my statement with no warning whatsoever. I called Wachovia to find out what PFM was and the agent said it was Microsoft Money and Personal Finance Manager. She said the charges were from Microsoft and I have been on a wild goose chase until just now to find out who and what this was all about. This misleading info what worse than the charge itself. I have wasted over an hour trying to find out what this was. Now that I know I am really ticked. I will download on my own and get a refund from Wachovia. This is just sad all the way around.