Don’t worry, they’re making plenty of cash, but Microsoft announced this week that they will no longer be producing their personal finance software, Microsoft Money.
This makes me sad as I’ve been an MS Money user for about 13 years! I switched from CA Kiplinger’s Simply Money to Microsoft Money 97 back in 1996 and have faithfully purchased upgrades every other year around tax time. I use it to download all of my bank, credit card, and brokerage statements, pay bills, balance the checkbook, generating spending reports, etc.
Microsoft says that more people are using their banks’ own websites and services nowadays so maintaining a standalone software package just isn’t worth it. That’s fine, and I do use my own bank’s or credit card provider’s web sites, but I like having everything consolidated in one place. When my current version of Money Plus expires in Feburary next year, I’m going to lose that convenience. Sure, the software will still work and I can manually enter transactions, but I won’t be able to use any of the online features. Instead, I’ll have to jump around to different web sites. On the bright side, if I move my finances into the cloud (scary though that is, from a security standpoint), I won’t have to deal with installing and activating Money on multiple PCs and then not having access to it when I’m on one of my Linux machines.
I’ve got 8 months to figure out my next step: maybe an online service line mint.com or switch to Quicken? Time to start researching alternatives. 🙁
I’ve been trying Yodlee’s MoneyCenter for a bit and it might do the job as a “dashboard” to replace Money. I might still have to use my bank’s own site for payments though (I still need to experiment with the bill payment feature in MoneyCenter). Yodlee is the backbone behind sites like mint.com so I figured I would go straight to the source.
Moneydance 2010 has been released. I played around a bit with the older 2008 version and it wasn’t bad, plus it’s cross-platform so it’ll run on my Linux netbooks. I’ll probably give the latest iteration a shot and see if I end up switching …
Actually, instead of Moneydance, I’m now trying mint.com since it also has an iPhone app.
It’s been a year and I’m still using Mint</a rel=”nofollow”>. For the most part I’m happy with it although I still miss the “one-stop shopping” I had with MS Money.