In the coming weeks, I have some technical choices I need to make.
- Personal Finance Software: For years, I have used Microsoft Money. In the last couple of years, though, I knew its days were numbered. The official announcement of its “end of life” is here. With this announcement, my choices are fairly limited in the realm of personal finance software: Quicken, Mint.com, or my Bank. My thoughts on each are below, but I crave input from others.
- Quicken: They clearly want the Money customers, and they are the oldest, biggest, and only player on the block. There is a limitation with how much transaction data they can convert to Quicken from Money. I also abandoned Quicken a long time ago, as I thought it getting long in the tooth–that was over 10 years ago. They are a serious contender for my software choice, and this is primarily because I really want and desire a desktop application.
- Mint.com: The darling of the Web 2.0 personal finance space, Mint offers a lot of the integration that I have with Money and would presumably get with Quicken. I only have two issues with Mint. For one, Mint.com does not yet offer any type of bill payment scheduling like I get with Quicken or Money. The other concern–not a large one–is my fear of the “personal finance cloud.” For someone who has a lot of information in the cloud, I seem to not be too big a fan of having my personal finance information exclusively in the cloud with no local backup. I have to admit that I like having a piece of software that connects to my bank and keeps everything in sync.
- My Bank: I will admit that my Bank’s online presence has greatly improved over what it was even 5 years ago. I do make use of its online billpay feature pretty extensively, and the eBill feature is not bad at all. Still, though, I have to admit that I crave that desktop experience. Also, my problem with both Mint.com and My Bank, is that I have no tactile feedback for bills that are due and such. I like having a desktop application remind me somehow. Call me old-fashioned in that sense.
- Virtualization Software: I have been a huge user of VMWare on my various machines through the years. It works quite nicely, and there is a completely capable free version. I did, however, download Sun’s VirtualBox the other day for use on my Win 7 desktop. In my coming experiment of running Windows 3.11 on Win 7, I am looking for a free virtualization solution. So, for the first time in a while, I am going to give VirtualBox a chance.
Looks like I get to have some fun in my spare time with these tasks in the coming weeks. Especially since my copy of MS Money is “on the clock,” with the online services expiring in October.
#1 by Julie on August 3, 2009 - 9:33 pm UTC
check out moneydance, its similar to Quicken but its cheaper and I think easier to use
#2 by JJT on August 3, 2009 - 9:40 pm UTC
Just took a peek at their site. It is interesting, and it seems to be pretty vibrant from a development perspective. I will have to give it the once-over as well.
For me, I think the deciding factor is integration with all of the online features I need.
#3 by Paul on August 3, 2009 - 10:13 pm UTC
I am a fan of VirtualBox. You get nearly all the functionality of Workstation, plus the easy ability to connect to the desktop with an RDP client.
Oh and you can convert VMWare images[1] to use with VirtualBox.
[1] provided the image was crated using IDE drives.