Every year I do a quick scan of the market to see if there is anything new out there that is better than Quicken. For several years now, the consensus has been that Quicken is the best overall application with the primary con being that it costs money in a market that provides a lot of "free" options.

The best pure investment platform has been Personal Capital. It's free if you can tolerate the monthly phone call or email to get you to speak with an advisor. They do have a simple budgeting feature that I actually appreciate, but zero bill tracking capability. If they had the latter I would go 100% in on Personal Capital and drop Quicken, but alas they don't.

There are other pure budgeting apps that are considered better than Quicken, but then lack the investment tracking and other all around features that Quicken has. Thus, it tends to be a tradeoff decision on features with these apps and Quicken always comes out on top because its the Swiss army knife of financial apps.

The primary "new" development I'm seeing is that Mint.com has supposedly overhauled their UI. I've used them in the past but ultimately quit it because their investment module sucked and account links frequently broke.

Has anyone used the new UI in Mint? Any opinions?

Interested to see replies here, I use an excel spreadsheet that has dashboards which has been perfect. Manually input data which I find useful personally.

For investing I stick with ThinkOrSwim and for index funds I just go through Vanguard direct.

ForeverAg said:

---

Interested to see replies here, I use an excel spreadsheet that has dashboards which has been perfect. Manually input data which I find useful personally.

For investing I stick with ThinkOrSwim and for index funds I just go through Vanguard direct.

---

FTR, I'm asking more from the point of view of an "aggregator" application. I don't do any actual investing through Quicken. All of our investments are at Fidelity and our 401k provider. We use Quicken and Personal Capital as front ends to view all of our data culled from all other financial institutions to get complete picture. In that regard, this is a read only use case.

Just wanted to be clear on point of my question.

Personal capital as aggregator only

Not much traction here so I'm going to load a handful of accounts into Mint and test the new UI myself. Ill report back with opinion for any lurkers who might be following this.

YouBet said:

---

Not much traction here so I'm going to load a handful of accounts into Mint and test the new UI myself. Ill report back with opinion for any lurkers who might be following this.

---

Mint is owned by Intuit, you would think the data connectors would be the same as Quicken.


Edit: oops Intuit sold Quicken in 2016

lockett93 said:

---

YouBet said:

---

Not much traction here so I'm going to load a handful of accounts into Mint and test the new UI myself. Ill report back with opinion for any lurkers who might be following this.

---

Mint is owned by Intuit, you would think the data connectors would be the same as Quicken.


Edit: oops Intuit sold Quicken in 2016

---

Yep, but even back when they were under same umbrella Mint frequently had connection problems that Quicken did not. Quite a bit of intuit community discussion about that back then.

I'm a software developer and I still use Excel for my personal finances and investment planning.

I've gone through this exercise in the past and Quicken is still be best app for me. Wish they would spend some time and money and bring it out of the 1990s though; it serves its purpose but could be so much more.

Ag CPA said:

---

I've gone through this exercise in the past and Quicken is still be best app for me. Wish they would spend some time and money and bring it out of the 1990s though; it serves its purpose but could be so much more.

---

Yes, if they would adopt something like Personal Capital's UI it would be stellar.

Ok, so I've been messing with it the past 30 minutes. Connected Fidelity which holds all of our taxable investment accounts, IRA's, and our spending account. And I connected our primary credit card which accounts for about 90% of total month to month spend.

The UI looks exactly the same as it always has so they are either lying about the overhaul they advertise on their main site page and in two different emails I've received, or they have not been clear on when the new UI changes are actually being deployed. However, their marketing material implies the new UI is live.

Does have bill tracking which is helpful, but the investment module is still very lacking and effectively useless compared to Personal Capital and even Quicken's built-in tools. Our spending account is loaded as an investment account since it's with Fidelity so that's annoying and always has been. Quicken gives you the ability to attach a cash account to it so you can properly record it and have it flow through the application reports correctly.

Looks like I'm sticking with Quicken still.

edit 1: the widget/screen shot examples I'm seeing in my email from them look nothing like I'm seeing online. I'm wondering if their deployment has been rolled back or if it's not a system-wide change.

edit 2: the UI update must only be for mobile and the desktop UI is unchanged. That would make sense from a mobile first development philosophy. Will check out the mobile version.

RockOn said:

---

I'm a software developer and I still use Excel for my personal finances and investment planning.

---

Ditto

Dr. Horrible said:

---

RockOn said:

---

I'm a software developer and I still use Excel for my personal finances and investment planning.

---

Ditto

---

Look what I just found for you Excel users. Will most definitely be testing this!!!

It looks like MS has essentially reintroduced their old Money program into Excel for free if you have a 365 subscription.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2020/06/15/introducing-money-excel-easier-manage-finances/

Quote:

---

Money in Excel is a dynamic, smart template and add-in for Excel that allows you to securely connect your bank, credit card, investment, and loan accounts to Excel and automatically import your transaction and account information into an Excel spreadsheet.

---

There's a program called Tiller that pulls transactions and balances from banks, credit cards, investments, etc. and dumps it into Google Sheets.

I'm not super familiar with all the functionality since I'm not personally setting everything up but it seems like a very capable system.

Excel. Have a budget and link all the months. Use only 2 credit cards. Maybe a check now and then. Some auto draft and very little cash. Have everything into about 15 categories with the 15Th being other. Otherwise it is too granular.

Manage wealth in a separate spreadsheet. Have 2 401k acct, a TD Ameritrade acct and use 1 bank for my savings and checking. Have some cash in a few high interest online acts although they are no longer high interest Is easy to track manually. I have weekly and monthly balances Quite simple and really doesn't take much time.

I am an old so probably better ways.

I recently switched from Mint to YNAB for budgeting and have really enjoyed it. The big hang up for me was the fact that it wasn't free, but in just a few months it has paid for itself. I also use Personal Capital as a broad view of our accounts overall, as YNAB really isn't built for investment/net worth tracking.

i've been a mint user for a long time. in previous years it did have problems with account connections from time to time but in recent years it hasn't seemed to be much of an issue.

the only exception is with robinhood. and recently robinhood seems to have blocked again 3rd parties from accessing due to security reasons and not sure if it will be enabled again on their side. so that's my only account at the moment that won't function properly in mint.

So, I got this Money in Excel up and running. It's clearly a WIP and I'm not sure what their long-term vision is for it. I would say that if you are already a 365 subscriber then maybe it's worth a look to set up just to see where they end up with it. I did that and plan to periodically check in on it. It could eventually be worth retiring Quicken or any other pay app you currently have if you are going to remain a 365 customer no matter what, but not right now.

Current features include integrations with financial institutions like Quicken, Mint, or Personal Capital do to enable the following: transactions with categories for tracking, a Net Worth view, a Recurring Expenses view for tracking subscriptions, and a summary dashboard. These are all separate sheets within an Excel Workbook. A Budget sheet is planned and forthcoming. The Recurring Expenses view could also essentially be thought of as your Bill Tracking view, but you might have to tweak the underlying formulas because it looks for the same recurring dollar amount and may miss a recurring utility bill that varies every month.

The Net Worth sheet is the only investments feature it has.

It won't connect to Coinbase, Optum Bank (HSA), or Guaranteed Rate (mortgage) but then Quicken and Personal Capital won't either so that's a wash.

Anyway, something to monitor.

Also a long-time Mint user, and it's my go to for tracking my budget and expenses. There is the occasional connection issues like mentioned above, but it's gotten much better than it used to be.

I did start using Personal Capital more often for just tracking my net worth, which is pretty nice.

Going to stick to my one-two punch of Quicken and Personal Capital. Can use PC's app for mobile budget and spending when needed. I don't sync with Quickens mobile app. It doesn't seem to sync well for me.

I haven't worked hard to resolve the problem as I'm only a half-assed Mint user but they seem to have problems accessing accounts with two factor security

Still use Quicken, even though it is clunky as hell.

Personal Capital can't really do a whole heck of a lot, but it's really pretty to look at as an overall financial summary.

Proposition Joe said:

---

Still use Quicken, even though it is clunky as hell.

Personal Capital can't really do a whole heck of a lot, but it's really pretty to look at as an overall financial summary.

---

To your point, Quicken's primary problem is their CX. Hire a damn expert and redesign it already. All the guts are there. It's the most complete personal financial application that exists with second place almost orders of magnitude behind it.

I'm frankly shocked they haven't invested in overhauling the UI. Maybe they are. I used to get regular emails from their CEO once they split off from Intuit about all the plans they had and I haven't received one of those in 2 years now.

I think I could turn that company around myself pretty quickly. Lol.

Q user for forever. I also look at alternatives every year. I have written the CEO extolling him to address the UI/UX issues. My read is they want everyone to migrate to the cloud by pressing use of Q Mobile.

I have no desire to aggregate my finances in the cloud. At the point I am forced I will move to Excel.

Exacty.

I hadn't used Quicken in 5-6 years... When the pandemic hit decided it was a good opportunity to get everything reconciled how I like it again, so got the new version.

Felt like I was running the 2010 version.

All the comments about Quicken are accurate. I have tried to move away several times but just can't find anything that is on par. The only item that I find lacking is their investment tracking. I have to go in about once a year and clean it all up to get back to close to accurate.

dallasiteinsa02 said:

---

All the comments about Quicken are accurate. I have tried to move away several times but just can't find anything that is on par. The only item that I find lacking is their investment tracking. I have to go in about once a year and clean it all up to get back to close to accurate.

---

I don't even attempt to do that anymore. I got behind on it and once you do that it's a lost cause. Mine is probably 98% accurate, but I think considering the complexity of investment tracking it's probably understandable that it's not 100% perfect in tracking the minutiae of that. Nothing else out there will track investments as granular as you can do it in Quicken.

You can periodically run the File Validation command and clean up some obvious gaps. That helps a little bit.

So, one more discovery on this...if you are a Fidelity customer you automatically have access to an aggregator tool called "Full View". Select the "Accounts & Trade" button in upper left and it's in that drop down.

Full View is a third party aggregator app like Mint and Personal Capital. It's not a Fidelity app but it's integrated with the site. It's missing Bill Pay/Tracking which Mint has, but it's Investment module is better than Mint's and it has no ads. Depending on your tradeoff preference, I would say its above Mint but below Personal Capital in quality.

Anyway, just another option. Not sure why Fidelity doesn't really market this on their own site. No idea how long it's been there.

I spent a couple of hours today looking for online alternatives to Quicken before I found this thread! As everyone said, Quicken is pricy, bloated, and outdated. So I created a Mint account and added my primary bank and credit card accounts. (Wanted to check out this much before importing any investment accounts.)

Pros:
- Perfectly connected and downloaded all accounts and transactions
- Default categories are fine and the auto-match worked reasonably well. Very easy to add categories and have it remember name and category for future transactions.
- Easy to add upcoming transactions/checks ("available balance" subtracts future transactions from "current balance")
- Simple that credit card payments show up as "transfers" so that credit card transactions aren't double counted
- Budgeting is simple but capable enough

Cons:
- No running balance column is included in transaction lists. I can understand why it's not there when viewing transactions from multiple accounts or when using transaction filters, but if you're viewing all transactions for just one account, it should be there. In Quicken, we put in all future transactions we know about (taxes, tuition, bills, etc), so it's nice to view the expected balance at any point in time. (I know from Yodlee, Plaid, and MX that institutions don't always pass a balance with a transaction, but it can be calculated.)
- Ads all over the place. I know there are ad-blockers specifically for Mint, but it would be nice to pay a premium to get rid of them, esp the ones in the middle of transaction lists.

So I liked what I saw, but the running balance issue was a deal-breaker. (I even tried a Javascript program that someone had developed to address this issue, but it didn't seem to work for me.)

I was surprised to see how expensive YNAB is. $84 per year or $12 per month? Quicken Deluxe is half the cost for probably 3-4x the features.

I remember when YNAB was free. My goodness that is crazy expensive.

Have any of your Quicken users tried Simplifi yet?

I'm an early mint user, not a quicken user but I've been trying simplifi for several months now. I like the UI and it has some things that mint doesn't. Only problem I've run into is it doesn't seem to want to connect to my Merrill accounts for some reason.

Thought I would check into this thread.

Re: Simplifi. Hadn't seen that one. Kind of amusing it's built by Quicken. What clearly happened here was that it was easier to build something new from the ground up instead of redoing Quicken Mobile. Ha.


My annual quicken subscription expires next month. The MS 365 Excel Money workbook now has a budget page. The only missing thing was a dedicated bill tracker, so I basically just manually keyed those into their own page.

Thus, I think I'm going to roll with Money 365 coupled with Fidelity Full View (+ Personal Capital as a second opinion for investments) and cancel Quicken. Really don't need the latter anymore. It's going to be hard not to use it though. I've been a quicken user for close to 20 years. But no need to spend that money anymore.