The new versions of all the Quicken products are available to purchase starting today, and shipping of the new software will begin on September 9. Intuit, the company that develops the Quicken software and owns the brand, is offering some special discounts to certain websites including Consumerism Commentary. I was not selected to be included in the Quicken 2009 beta test, so I have not seen the software yet. I will most likely download the latest version and share my thoughts as soon as possible.

I’ve been generally happy with my switch from Microsoft Money to Quicken several years ago. There were some improvements I hoped for last year after my dissatisfaction with the earliest release of Quicken 2007 and my reconsideration after Intuit released some fixes. None of the ideas on my wish list were included in the 2008 version, so I’d like to get a look at any improvements in the newest release.

Here are the products now available as well as the discounted price for each. These prices beat even those listed by Amazon.com. All of these products except for the Online Edition can be ordered as CD-ROMs to be delivered to you or as direct downloads.

More discounted Quicken products and other deals are available here.

I will continue to be a Quicken user. There have been many attempts to develop web-based software for money management, including Mint, Geezeo, and even Quicken Online (review here). None of these programs suit my needs at this point.

It’s barely been a month since the iPhone update which allows people to download applications written by 3rd-party developers, and there are already more than 1,000 to choose from. Here are a few of the more promising entries in the field of Personal Finance:

Loan Shark

(Web | iTunes)

It’s unreasonable to expect that a person, when presented with a loan offer, can glance at the numbers and determine whether the salesperson is trying to rip them off. If it hadn’t happened to a friend of mine, I might’ve chalked this scenario up to simple paranoia, but it does happen. Thankfully, what with the Internet empowering us all, it happens less and less.

If all you’re looking to do is check the math on a loan offer, there are other ways to go about it. For example, you could point your mobile browser to CalcNexus’s Auto Loan Calculator and get an answer pretty quickly. The major advantage to the Loan Shark iPhone app is that it saves loan details to a Favorites screen so you can compare offers from different banks.

It also shows amortization tables and works as well for credit cards and home loans. For my money, in this case US$4.99, that’s a lot more convenient than carrying around a notepad and a pen.

Save Benjis

(Web | iTunes)

At some point (for me this happens weekly), you’ve been in a store, looking at something you probably want to buy, and you thought to yourself, “I could get this cheaper somewhere else.” Save Benjis answers your doubts for you in a matter of seconds. Best of all, it’s free, so you have nothing to lose if you want to give it a try.

Pick & Choose – Groceries

(Web | iTunes)

“Okay, I’m at Target. What was that other thing I needed to buy?” The analog lifestyle solution to this conundrum was always to keep a shopping list on the fridge and take it with you. But more often than not, I’m coming straight from work, or I forgot the list at home.

You may have noticed by now that I have a sort of contempt for paper records. Anyway…

This app has a built-in database of over 1,500 grocery items, so you barely need to type anything. In fact, I think I’m going to buy this app right now.

Nicholas emailed me with this question.

I’m trying to find some kind of free accounting software for balancing my checkbook, and that sort of thing. I already use Mint.com, but it isn’t much good if I plan on writing a check, or if I want to create a recurring transaction.

I don’t need something to actually connect to my bank account, although it would be convenient to be able to import transactions. I just need to be able to keep track of everything. Right now I’m using Excel, but Excel really isn’t meant to be this kind of tool. I’d appreciate any recommendations you might have. Thanks!

Nicholas is right about Mint, Yodlee MoneyCenter, and other online services. These websites rely on downloading information from banks, and banks don’t know when you write a check unless you have sophisticated business services. For Nicholas’s purposes, these services fall short.

If Intuit Quicken and Microsoft Money Plus are out of the question—and Nicholas’s requirement according to his email is free—then there aren’t many solutions available.

I would suggest GnuCash. GnuCash is free accounting software available for Linux and other flavors of Unix, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows. Like Quicken and Money, GnuCash allows you to track your financial accounts, including cash, credit, and investments.

Unlike Quicken and Money, the designers of GnuCash take an approach more true to professional accounting principles like double-entry accounting. While the more popular (and more expensive) software programs use “accounts” to represent assets and liabilities and use “categories” to record expenses and income, GnuCash considers assets, liabilities, income, and expenses to all be accounts. That means that every transaction is recorded as a transfer between two accounts.

It’s a little weird at first, but it begins to make more sense as you have more practice.

GnuCash will let you easily track your checkbook. When you create a new book of accounts (which GnuCash calls a file because the database is stored in a computer file), the default options include a checking account. You can use the default checking account, or add more if you have more than one to track, to keep your checkbook up to date.

When you write a check, you could record a decrease (GnuCash calls this a “withdrawal”) to your checking account and an increase (GnuCash calls this an “expense”) to the appropriate expense account, such as your telephone expense account. In this manner, your checking account in GnuCash will always match your checkbook. You will be able to see at a glance how much money you have truly available in the account, to help prevent overdrafts.

The problem with tracking a checking account is the reconciliation between your book of accounts (ledger) and the bank statement. If you have outstanding checks—checks you have sent out but haven’t been cashed by the recipients—then the balance in GnuCash won’t match the balance at the bank.

While the above method will be fine for most people and has the benefit of tracking the usable balance in your checking account, if you want to keep a true reconciliation, then you need an additional account. The other option is to create a liability account called “Outstanding Checks.”

When you write a check, record an increase to Outstanding Checks and an increase to the appropriate expense account, perhaps the telephone expense account like above. Then, once the phone company deposits your check and your bank has decreased your balance, you can record a decrease to Outstanding Checks and a decrease to your checking account.

Both options are accurate, so it’s up to you which method to use. If you download GnuCash, both options are free as well. GnuCash does more than just balance your checkbook, as well. It does more than you might expect from free software. Here are some of the features you might find useful:

• QIF and OFX support, so you can download files from your bank and reconcile your accounts
• Schedule recurring transactions
• Track your investment accounts and download stock prices
• Use multiple currencies
• Generate reports and graphs to illustrate your finances

There’s one drawback. If you want to run GnuCash on an operating system other than Windows, you’ll have to “compile” the software yourself. There are instructions for installing and using GnuCash here.

“Stat Crazy” wrote in to ask a few questions about recording personal finances in Quicken. His first question is about recording expenses.

If you purchase something during the month one June 15 with a VISA card, then submit an online payment on June 28, and the card says it is paid off on June 30 but it does not pull the cash from your bank account until July 3, then which month do you apply the expense? In my balance statement I am lazy and just say I have no balance AND the money is still in the bank account since I strictly take data from my online statements and reported transaction dates.

I track my finances using a hybrid accrual method. That means that I take most expenses and income on the day they occur, not the day I receive or withdraw the associated cash. You’re free to use whatever method makes the most sense to you, but this is how I do it.

On June 15 you experienced an expense in the form of a purchase using your credit card. If your purchase was, for example, a birthday gift, you would record the category as Gifts Given (an expense category in Quicken). On June 28 and June 30, you wouldn’t record anything in order to reflect your true savings account balance for the end of the month.

Even though your credit card’s website shows that your payment was applied on June 30, I would prefer keeping the cash recorded in your savings account until your bank debits your account. Therefore, on July 3, record a transfer in Quicken from your savings account to your credit card account. In your savings account, you would record the description as something like “Credit Card Payment” with the category as [VISA Credit Card]—the name of your credit card account in Quicken. A category in brackets denotes a transfer of money, not an expense.

Using this hybrid accrual technique, your income statement will reflect your Gifts Given expense in June while your balance sheet will reflect your proper June account balances (with accuracy in the savings account taking precedence over the credit card account). Your expense should come when you make a purchase, not necessarily when your bank account is affected.

The cash flow report is used less often. If you paid your credit card from your active checking account, and if your checking account is properly configured as a cash flow account for that report, then it would reflect an outflow in July when you transferred money to your credit card. This might be different if you paid the card from a savings account, as savings are generally not cash flow accounts.

If you use Microsoft Money or any other financial tracking program, the concept is the same but some of the details in terms of category names may be slightly different.

This is the method I use because it makes the most sense to me. The beauty about personal finance is that you don’t have the SEC knocking on your door asking for accurate reports nor must you follow Generally Accepted Accounting Principles.

For the purposes of this article, the term “iPhone” includes “iPod Touch”, and I’m assuming that your operating systems are up to date.

Along with new firmware for existing iPhone owners, and the new iPhone 3G itself, Apple is releasing this week a new service called “MobileMe”, succinctly described as “Exchange for the rest of us.” In short, it automatically syncs your contacts, calendar, e-mail and photos between your home computer and/or work computer and/or iPhone. It stores these items in a 20 GB cloud of data and is smart enough to push updates to you from any of these categories, wherever you are, as long as you have an Internet connection or cell phone signal.

It sounds wonderful. Unfortunately, it costs $99 (US) a year for one person or $149 for a Family Pack. Calendars and contacts don’t take up much hard drive space, but between e-mail attachments and photos, it wouldn’t be that hard to bump up against the 20 GB ceiling, and it’s $49 for another 20 GB (or $99 for another 40 GB). As of this writing, a 500 GB hard drive goes for around $100. I will admit that managed data storage should be more expensive than buying yourself a hard drive, but twelve times as expensive?

I think we should hold off on signing up for MobileMe for a little while, because if the goal is automatic syncing of your contacts, calendar, e-mail and photos, I predict Google and Yahoo! are going to make this possible for free (and probably with “unlimited” data storage) in the near future. Taking each one in turn:

E-mail

If you use GMail (and I believe everybody should, even if your e-mail address is at a different domain), your e-mail is already syncing with GMail on your iPhone. Having it automatically pushed to your phone isn’t happening, yet, but it will be possible for all applications to take advantage of the “cloud computing” scenario that Apple designed for the iPhone. Do you suspect that Google won’t make a GMail app for the iPhone with push e-mail?

Contacts

With the update to OS X 10.5.3, you can already sync your contacts between your iCal (and by extension, the iPhone) and Google. See previous comment about future push scenarios, but for the time being, it would be a weird kind of emergency needed to make a lack of push technology a serious problem in this arena.

Calendar

I actually originate my calendar with Google Calendar, and subscribe to it in iCal, and by extension, my iPhone. See previous comment about future push scenarios, but Google already has a nicely iPhone-formatted version of the Calendar that loads in the Web browser.

Photos

This is probably the first thing that made me second-guess my temptation to subscribe to MobileMe, mainly because I love my Flickr account. It’s got a long history, and all my friends are there, etc. I can already e-mail photos from my iPhone to Flickr using a customized e-mail address, so that could hardly be simpler. Even so, it appears that Flickr has every intention of making their site as friendly as possible for the iPhone.

Now, I’m merely speculating that Google will come out with native iPhone apps that mimic most of the functionality of MobileMe, but look at Google’s track record. They try everything, and succeed at most of them. My plan as described may not be as elegant as a MobileMe account, but I think it’ll be just as easy, and it’ll cost 100% less.

This is only a prediction. Don’t blame me if I’m wrong. But unless you know something I don’t about Google’s plans, it’d still be smart to wait a month or so and see what they have to offer.

August 25 update: Quicken 2009 is now available for purchase. Consumerism Commentary readers get good discounts here.

I’m a heavy user of Quicken, so I’m considering signing up for the “beta test program” of the new version that will be released later this summer. If you’re approved for the beta test program, you will receive a link to download an early version of Quicken 2009, a work in progress released to a sample of users who would ideally provide feedback.

You can expect bets releases like these to contain bugs, so if you’re concerned about your data integrity, you may not want to sign up. Once you convert your Quicken data to the 2009 formats, you won’t be able to turn back if you decide the program doesn’t work as well as expected or if you don’t like it.

More information about how to sign up for the beta program is within this post. Read the rest of this article »

As I mentioned briefly, I was in San Francisco for a few days to meet with software developers and strategists from NetworthIQ, ExpensR, and MyStrands. The companies are working together to develop web-based personal finance management software, with the intention of meeting customers’ needs that are not met by Mint, Geezeo, Quicken Online, and others. The companies invited a number of bloggers who write about personal finance to share their experiences and needs with each other.

This workshop gave me the perfect opportunity to meet many of the writers I’ve been working with for several years. Not only did we discuss financial software, but we also got to know each other quite a bit and share blogging tips and tricks. However, the main questions of the day pertained more to financial management software.

I would have to say that personal finance bloggers are not the typical consumers. For example, I track my finances in great detail—though less detail than I did six years ago—using Quicken’s desktop software. Several times a week, I update my transactions and reconcile my accounts against information downloaded from my banks, and once a month, I review my reports to get a good handle on the bigger picture. I do not want to spend any more time than I do now, especially if it involves categorizing my expenses. Software like Mint (reviewed here by Sasha) and Quicken Online (previewed by me) will connect directly to your bank for downloading your transactions and attempt to categorize your spending based on patterns, but this system is not perfect and requires significant manual correction.

Additionally, for most people, the information downloaded from banks does not create a full picture of spending. Although more spending takes place through electronic transactions, cash still plays a large role. Software must include a way to enter cash transactions, not downloadable from any bank. In order to save current Quicken users from expending more effort, I suggested allowing the new web software to “plug in” to existing desktop software. This would allow users like me to take advantage of some of the planned “Web 2.0” features, like “social networking” and cross-segment comparisons.

All the bloggers had great suggestions for what we’d like to see, but the big questions are how to make personal finance mainstream and what would the most people want to see as the 21st century brings technological advances. So this leads to one question for readers, particularly those of you who think outside the box: What do you want your personal finance software to do and how does that differ from your existing solution?

The other day, I participated in a preview of the new Quicken Online product, scheduled to launch on January 8. This new product is intended to compete with some of the existing money management web tools currently existing, like Mint, reviewed by Sasha here, Geezeo, and Wesabe. Intuit has spotted a need for a more robust solution for managing cash flow, and the targeted audience, “young and responsible,” is increasingly turning towards the web for software.

The philosophy behind Quicken Online is that people are living beyond their means and need help managing short-term cash flow. The most pressing question for many younger earners is whether they will have enough money to pay their bills. Therefore, they haven’t built in tools yet to manage investments. Quicken Online will track your checking, savings, and credit card accounts.

Right away I saw that Quicken Online is very different than the traditional Quicken desktop software. Read the rest of this article »