How Quicken Has Lost My Trust
This is obnoxious: Quicken Deluxe has a built in feature to help you plan for buying a home. Normally, this would be great! I’m looking to buy a home. How helpful!
Here’s the catch, however, in the middle of filling out your information, Quicken gives you advice — bad advice — all in the name of trying to sign you up for their Quicken Loan program.
That’s right — the software you paid for — you paid $60 — is injecting opaque ads into the software, and even willing to give you bad advice just to make an additional buck.
WTF?!
I’ve been a pretty faithful user of Quicken. Not only having resisted the undercut pricing of MS Money, I also started using TurboTax since I liked Quicken so much.
I was even willing to tolerate the obvious adware in Quicken, such as the little rotating text in the lower right offering to help me check my credit report. Not to mention the offers to “Use Quicken BillPay!”, “Sign up for Quicken Mastercard!”, “Protect my Data!”, “Order Checks!” and all the other crap.
Today, however, crossed the line & there’s a good chance next time I upgrade it won’t be to something in the Quicken family.
Today, while downloading transactions from my usual accounts, I noticed an option in the menu “Home Purchase Planner.” Hey, I’m looking to buy a house, that could be useful. Quicken has all my info, maybe they’ll give me something helpful.
I run through the numbers, and at one point it offers to get current interest rates online. Okay, sounds good — love that online integration. It asks me for some numbers that make sense (size of loan, state, etc.) and comes back with something surprising… a loan with a somewhat low interest rate, but even more surprising, a loan promising payments a full $1,000 less per month than everything else I had been seeing.
Only because I’ve been looking around, talking to my credit union & the banker my brother used, did I know something was seriously out of wack. What was it? Well, the loan they where offering, so cleverly called the “Smart Choice” was an Interest Only loan!
Imagine if I (or someone else) had used this as the core of my planning. We’d be making one of the largest purchases of our life, misled by deceptive advertising embedded in Quicken.
Until now, I’ve stayed away from MS Money, simply because, well MS is evil. But how much more evil can you get than this?
Screw Quicken. I’m going to switch to Money.
May 16th, 2005 at 4:29 pm
I got pissed when they recently forced upgrades of quicken 2002. It wasn’t the money at all- I would gladly have paid for an upgrade, if every version since hadn’t gotten horrible reviews. I was just waiting for a version I could trust. When they tried to force an upgrade I jumped to MS Money and have been delighted ever since.
May 16th, 2005 at 11:49 pm
i like how your complaint about quicken caused yahoo ads to show quicken.
May 17th, 2005 at 6:33 am
What other options are there besides Quicken and Money. I still don’t want to change to Money and Quicken is becoming too big of a program. Is there any other comerical products that do this?
May 17th, 2005 at 9:44 am
gnucash is a freeware attempt at a Quicken/Money replacement. I haven’t used it much, but it may be worth at least what you pay for it.
May 18th, 2005 at 7:40 am
please join the crowd moving to gnucash. it’s
great as it is, and has a good roadmap for any
programmers looking to lend a hand on an important
project.
May 20th, 2005 at 1:06 pm
I think your comments on the incessant marketing is right on. It’s to the point where it seems to be ad-supported software.
May 28th, 2005 at 4:20 pm
if there were an alternative to quicken on mac [that didn’t suck] i’d try it.
iBank is one, it’s horrible.
June 4th, 2005 at 1:29 am
I have been a long time quicken user. In the 80’s I had PeachTree and switched to Quicken because it was simpler and easy to use. Quicken has become complex and difficult to use with the ever changing versions. In 2002 I upgraded for $80 but paid around $200 to technical help to convert. I never understood the logic that my quicken 98 worked fine but problems upgrading to quicken 2002 was not a quicken issue. I dropped quicken this year due to another required upgrade but I have not yet switched to ms money. In the next month I will explore making payments by credit card (there is a record) and I will check ms money. The truth is that I would have stayed with quicken if they stopped the new software up grades requiring me to learn. A simple annual lic. fee would be better. I don’t have the time to keep up with quicken changes. PS: I liked Quicken 98 and have found quicken 2002 budget process more difficult to use with multiple accounts.
JP
June 4th, 2005 at 1:00 pm
Agreed, JP. It’d be interesting to hear you experiences with MS Money.
July 21st, 2005 at 12:27 am
I agree. They made me upgrade and now refuse to re-register my new version of Quicken Personal after a hard disc crash. They don’t answer the phones. My advise - don’t EVER buy a Quicken product.
September 12th, 2005 at 2:01 pm
I am also jumping ship to MS Money. 2 reasons:
1. my bank switched to a MS format for directly downloading transactions. They tell me their former relationship with Quicken was getting too expensive.
2. I tried out Quicken Billpay, but could never get it to work. I thought maybe it wasn’t set up properly and gave up. I found out 10 months later, they were deducting $9.95 per month from my account. That part worked great! My fault for not checking sooner, but when I asked Quicken for a refund for all those months I was charged for no use, they told me “no refund”. I guess they need that extra hundred bucks to make up for what they lost when my bank ditched em.
It will be a “cold day” before I use Intuit again!
February 10th, 2006 at 6:31 am
When Quicken would no longer support without charge Quicken 2004. I upgraded to 2006. This fixed the problem of not being able to back up one of my files, however when I tried to print a report (Cannon Printer) Quicken crashed. After several tries with their free chat support. They asked what printer I was using. Then I was told they had an unresuolved issue with my printer. I checked from time to time for an version upgrade and recently loaded ver. 4. Still no fix. I purchased a new laser printer (Brother) Quicken crashed. three days of e-mail suport, merry go round of uninstalling, reinstalling Quicken and printers. I was told there is an unresolved issue with my new printer. I should try an HP printer. I have used Quicken from mid 80’s, now will swith to Money.
May 18th, 2006 at 6:47 am
I am a user of Quicken for more than 15 years and I am very dissapointed with the lates software releases Quicken 2004-2006. These releases really sucks. Too many features do not work at all or work partially which is annoying.
For example, I want to compute my Federas Taxes for 2006 todate and the information picked up is garbage. Most of the time picks up 2005 data or pickups some weird info. I have reported this to Intuit many times and they have done nothing.
November 21st, 2006 at 4:50 pm
PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE ~ is there ANY way to convert Quicken 98 for Mac files to Quicken 2006 for Mac? If not, is there an option to convert to Quicken 2005 for Mac? I’ve got 15 years of data that I cannot lose ! I’ve been trying to get an answer from Intuit/Quicken support for more than an entire day, but all I get is foreigners who keep telling me that drag/drop should work with no converson at all ~ and which I’ve tried with no success. I’ve also searched the internet with no success. Thanks so much for ANY help you can give me ~ If you can, please reply directly to me at sjcurry@mac.com. I will SO grateful to anyone who can help me.
Thank you ~
~ Sharon