I’ve been using MoneyDance for years. It’s multi-currency, solid, and under regular development.
What made balancing your checkbook largely obsolete is the ability to connect directly to your bank to check your balance – but there are important qualifiers. Balancing your checkbook can tell you when payments have gone astray, and it’s not just lost checks, electronic glitches can happen. It’s also important to check to see where payments are going; sometimes duplicate payments are made, payments do not go through online, or you’re being scammed. There’s nothing having to unravel a hacked account to make you appreciate the need to check your accounts periodically.
I have found that checks do have some particular advantages. One is keeping credit card information out of the hands of organizations you don’t trust; we have had trouble stopping subscriptions which we no longer want. Another is paying contractors who don’t take credit cards; some are small businesses, others are doing big jobs and don’t want to be dinged for 3% of their fee. For that matter, as a freelance writer, I have never accepted credit cards because of that overhead; most of my clients pay electronically into my bank account, but I still get a few checks.
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Great points.
Just to be clear, I never said that balancing your monthly statement is obsolete, just that I never taught it to my kids 
. The parts of Quicken I said were made obsolete by online banking are things like checking balances, confirming and searching for recent transactions, and of course things like paying bills.
Those are definitely issues. But note that the younger generations pay without fees using PayPal’s “Friends and Family” option or Venmo. And businesses are accepting them more and more. Zelle also works and is free, but it’s not real-time and so much more trouble to get confirmation that payment went through. All of those also have the advantage of not exposing your CC info. Apple Pay also solves the privacy issue, but brings back the fee in exchange for being the most painless of all the options out there.
Isn’t Quicken a California company? If so, the CPR just hiked their minimum wages an average of 16% with some going from $15.50 to $16 (ca 3%) while others going to $20 (ca 29%) so that may be a factor.
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I believe Paypal has been cracking down on “Friends and Family” transactions because it was abused by some businesses. They don’t seem to care about small amounts, but they do care about larger ones. I have heard of serious problems with PayPal, Zelle and Venmo. I have received payments through Zelle a few times, but the last time it was to transfer the money into our bank. Both Zelle and Venmo require smartphones, which I don’t use because they are hard on my aging eyes, but that’s normally not a problem for young people.
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I have been a happy user of GNUCash since Quicken was abandoned the first time on the Mac. I just wasn’t going to use Windows and many of the additional functions didn’t work for those of us outside of the US.
Around the same time, Now Software went bust the second time and 19 years of CRM, calendar and contact data in their proprietary database went poof.
In the end, I decided that it was my data and so if I couldn’t get my data in an out of an application, then I’d stop using it.
The transition to GNUCash was a bit challenging but I was able to export the data from Quicken and import into GNUCash. Since Quicken doesn’t have proper double entry accounting, it took some time to “fix” the data but since then it’s been solid. It isn’t quite as nice as I remember Quicken, I needed to learn a bit more about accounting but it doesn’t need a subscription and doesn’t post my financial data on the cloud.
It is under constant development and the community and developers are active. Over the years the import/export has only gotten better and easier so a transition from Quicken is much easier today.
YMMV
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Did a quick browse of it. My initial impression of it is that it seems like a cost effective alternative to some of the other fee based products that do not support integrated bill pay, especially those with a subscription model.
Nuke also points out one important point about subscription models that so many do not realize. That is that subscription models, similar to ransomware, can hold your data hostage till you pay. And they can do this for as long as you wish to access your own data. That is why I refuse to us any subscription based software that involves storing your personal data such as Quicken and Banktivity, some CRM products and note Apps. While some of these offer export capability, the process can be complex and often does not export all of your data in a format that can be properly interpreted by other products or readable by a human by looking at it.
For the very few subscription products I use, such as anti-virus products such as ClamXAV, I have adopted a policy of only using such products for services that do not involve storage of my data. The last thing I want to do is pay someone to install a product on my machine that can be utilized as ransomware to block me from accessing my own data unless I continue to pay.
I keep checks around specifically for that purpose. Nine of the last ten checks I wrote were to one of two people: my plumber and my lawyer. Both work independently, and while they’re willing to accept electronic payments, they prefer checks.
Cheques (as we spell them down here) have essentially been deprecated in Australia with the treasurer saying they’ll be out by 2030.
“The Albanese Government will work to ensure Australians continue to have access to the payments services they require as the nation shifts away from the use of cheques.
The cheque system in Australia will wind down no later than 2030.”
Given cheques account for only 0.2% of payments I’ll be surprised if they last until 2030. I’ve not had a chequebook for over 10 years and the last one I received was a refund from a phone company when I changed providers. It was for 18c - considerably less than the cost of the postage to send it. I didn’t cash it
A warning about Quicken Cloud. I accidentally told Quicken to connect to Quicken Cloud, then went had to wait a while to turn Quicken Cloud off. Quicken Cloud complained about a few errors, but I skipped them before I turned Quicken Cloud back off. When I started working on my file again, I noticed our total assets had changed, and a quick check revealed that connecting to Quicken Cloud had lost the increases in real estate property in 2021, 2022 and 2023. I reverted to a December 29 backup and recovered the original values. I don’t know what happened, but that was a disturbing change, and I was lucky to have spotted it.
I use Zelle from my computer, using the banks’ online banking web sites. No mobile device involved.
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I believe Venmo can be used from the desktop as well.
This Quicken support page may be worth a look for folks concerned about or annoyed by Quicken Cloud. It says that Quicken Cloud is required only for automatic downloads of data, and so, since I have no use for either Quicken Mobile or On the Web, I plan to disconnect from QC, follow the instructions here to delete my data, and continue to use the desktop software’s update individual or update all accounts commands, as I do now. If for some reason that doesn’t work because it’s “automatic” (and in the cases where I do it anyway because an institution doesn’t support Quicken updates fully–Vanguard–or at all–my 457b custodian) I can always download QFX files.
If that all works as I hope–and returning to Dave’s original post–I’ll be free to reconsider my subscription.
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We first heard of Zelle several years ago when a tenant tried to pay her rent and I could not receive the deposit because our bank did not offer Zelle and it required a smartphone. Apparently it’s changed since then, but it wasn’t evident when I looked into it a couple of years ago.
Thanks for the explanation. As long as I can download from my banks, Fidelity and credit cards, I’m happy, and that’s working now. The Quicken says that the Quicken Cloud is not a backup to your Quicken data on your Mac. I’m not exactly clear on what they are doing, but I noticed that when I accidentally synched my Quicken to the Quicken Cloud, the data that disappeared was information I had entered on property tax increases, something not recorded directly in any bank. If my interpretation is right (and that’s an important IF), and you have entered data into Quicken that is not in the banks, you should be careful in Synching.
I do the same with my property values, Jeff, and I bet you’re right. If you are, the value of Quicken Mobile and Web is at best limited for anyone who has anything other than bank accounts and credit cards to keep track of. Which must, I imagine, be almost anyone who needs this sort of software in the first place and makes Dave’s original post all the more relevant–if all a subscription gets me is Quicken Cloud, I can do without it.
But others here have made good points about what it pays for, not least the struggle to keep up with a myriad of different and constantly evolving online financial platforms. I’ll still be thinking it over, but may in the end decide it’s important to support their efforts, since I think it’s the best thing of its sort out there.
I’ll post an update when I have finished my experiment–if you get there first, I hope you will too.
Had a similar experience with my Wells Fargo account. They offered the feature on their iOS app but not on the website. I don’t do any financial transactions on my phone for security reasons, so I had to live without. Not a big deal for me.
Wow! Intuit is shutting down Mint as well, which I have been using for years. Fortunately, this forced me to assess the alternatives. My 2 favorites:
- Lunch money - indie developer, lets you pick your own price. CON: only uses stripe, so not all institutions work
- Monarch Money - great piece of software with very robust bank syncing support. If you have lots of accounts, go with these folks.
I ended up paying for both. LunchMoney has some great budgeting features, and I just wanted to support an indie dev, but Monarch is working better for my needs at the moment. I’ll never rely on intuit again for anything ever.
Sorry you’re stuck on the subscription treadmill. I got MYM (Managing Your Money) in 1993 and am still using it 30 years later in an old iMac still working on System 7. I’ve never paid a cent to Quicken for a subscription and saved several thousand dollars if you take interest and inflation into account. Count me out for ever getting a subscription personal finance software program.
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I bought MYM back in the 80s, IIRC.
It even came with a nicely printed manual!