DrWu said:
-I took a loan out of my 401(k). Can you say QUICKEN NIGHTMARE??? I have no idea how to do this. Currently it looks like my 401(k) return % is in the tank because I "lost" all this money. I have no idea how to fix this. I even used their "wizard" to enter the transaction. . .I don't know what happened.

-For awhile I could never get my 401(k) balance to accurately reflect FMV. After a great deal of searching I finally figured out that in this very tiny menu there are historical prices and somehow a very low futuristic price got in there and was making the balance appear very low.Quicken Deluxe 2004's handling of my 401K is also a major problem for me. That's the main reason I've been considering switching to MS Money.

The problems all started when I took a loan from my 401K which I paid back in full a few months later. For some reason, Quicken now adds the full loan balance into my account every download - causing my account balance totals to be grossly incorrect.

I tried re-creating those accounts from scratch and it still exhibits the same behaviour. I wrote this off as a problem with the web services of my 401K provider but, since others have similar problems, maybe it's a Quicken issue.

Just remember two or three months ago, MS money site was down for a couple of days, and people had trouble with their accounts. Something to think about money vs quicken.

I was a long time Quicken user until this spring when they stopped supporting older software versions and appeared to be actively keeping them from working properly. Let's just say I was more than mildly annoyed with them, when my beloved version of Quicken y2k ceased updating stocks and accounts easily. I wasn't going to keep these current manually and paying for an updated version seemed like EXTORTION.

Sooo, I did the unthinkable and converted to a msMoney 2001 version which came with my laptop and had been sitting their unused taking up space. The automatic conversion was not without a few challenges, but was amazingly smooth. The only thing I really miss is the nice Quicken networth graph with true stacked bar chart(assets/liabilities) and line showing value. Money's stacked bar charts suck and do not even show liabilities as negative. But, I can simply look at the numeric reports for networth and income/spending, and not use Money's graphics at all. I guess, I also miss Quicken's nice retirement planner, which automatically updated with stock changes, etc. to show you how well you were meeting or not meeting your goals. However, I don't miss either of these enough to pay Quicken (intuit) another dime and they can eat my shorts, if they think I'll pay them extortion $$$ to update software which was working just fine until they stopped supporting it.

As far as the newer software 'requiring' updates in two years, they can bite my shorts too. That's ridiculous and more extortion. I realize they are trying to follow the profit example of virus protection SW, and make users pay to update subscriptions etc., but there are far too many of us old-timers accustomed to getting it for free to be easily prostituted by this new paradigm. In summary, I'll use whatever I can get for free and won't pay extra for bells & whistles or dogs & ponies. Why pay for something you can get for free??

Quicken 2004 all of a sudden stopped downloading properly from my PNC account (major PIA) -- I have to deactivate and reactive the online access every time to get transactions. I'm wondering if going to Money would solve this, but I also really love the networth graphs, etc that are easily accessible in Quicken. Maybe upgrading Quicken would fix the PNC problems as well, but I'm afraid my 3 year old file is just corrupted in some way

Who knows. If anyone has any experience with upgrading a possible corrupted file (whether to Money or Quicken), let me know.

DrWu said:
-I struggle greatly with business expenses. I travel a lot for work and currently I have $12,000 in expense receivables. I dump everything into a seperate account to track seperately, but it's hard to reconcile what I've expensed, what I haven't, what I've been reimbrused for, and what I haven't.


just a suggestion: i used to travel several times a month on business plus customer lunches in between trips so i understand. what i ended up doing is to just keep the hardcopy of the latest expense reports (even after we went to web based entry, we could print a single page hardcopy summary) in the front of a folder. when i got a reimbursement, i went to those expense reports and wrote paid on it, the amount and when, then moved it/them to the back of the folder. we also had to turn in receipts so if i didn't have a receipt, then i knew i had submitted it.

and, it helps to fill out the expense report asap after incurring the expenses....after all, why lend your money to the company any longer than necessary.

DrWu said:
-Investments are a huge gray area with Quicken. Until two years ago, I didn't even track my 401(k) in Quicken because it was nearly impossible. Today it's still really hard (and I have an accounting background). The program puts in these "placeholder" entries (I have no idea what these are); they drive me nuts.

I just want to know how my 401(k) is doing, but it's next to impossible.

I started an IRA in 1998, and now have 401K, IRA, brokerage acct, etc. to track.

I've been upgrading every year to the new Quicken, and everything has been going smoothly, until...

DUN DUN DUNNNNN!! (scary music intro) QUICKEN 2004


For people who don't track investments like IRA's, heres the basics. You actually have TWO balances to be concerned with. A cash balance which is just like a checking acct, and your holdings (the stocks & funds that you have invested in). Up until 2004, Quicken always kept TWO seperate but linked accounts to keep track of these things. In Q2004, they decided to try to merge the accounts. I don't think even Warren Buffet would be able to comprehend the jumbled mess this creates. Like DrWu said, it started adding these 'placeholders' for some reason. I could never figure out the purpose, since they were not needed before. I managed to get my data back to Quicken 2003, and will be staying there as long as I can.

I'd also like to know why the Quicken designers do not consider U.S. Savings Bonds a common investment. I've been entering my bond values & serial numbers into a generic asset account. Once a year, I manually update the values. Seems like there should be a better way to do this. (Yes, I also use the Savings Bond Wizard program, but wanted this functionality built into Quicken.)

Apparently the Quicken converter doesn't really understand what's in a .QDF file after all. That's all I needed to see - I uninstalled Money and counted myself lucky for not having wasted more than 10 minutes on it.Lucky that you're locked into using Quicken, which you don't like? The Money->Quicken converter was MUCH worse. If you only need to convert once, I think that it is worth it if the product you're moving to is better.I went to set up the online access for the accounts and found you have to do this strange thing where you create a new account with online access and then merge it with the old one creating duplicate entries that you have to delete one by one, not impressed.In 2004, you could setup online access with a preexisting account. I'd be surprised if they actually took this functionality away. The 2004 version also let you say choose the time period to import records from online. If you set this to a very short period, you'd at least have FEWER redundant entries if they did change it for the worse. The online sync seems to have siginificant trouble with some accounts that were never a problem in Quicken including ING USA who apparently isn't supported, only ING Canada.According to a previous thread, you can no longer auto-download in ING in Quicken either. EDIT: This has been confirmed by multiple posters in this thread.

harlock001 said:I'd also like to know why the Quicken designers do not consider U.S. Savings Bonds a common invertment. I've been entering my bond values & serial numbers into a generic asset account. Once a year, I manually update the values. Seems like there should be a better way to do this. (Yes, I also use the Savings Bond Wizard program, but wanted this functionality built into Quicken.)Same thing with MS-Money at least though the 2004 release. I'm hoping it's addressed in 2005, but am not holding my breath as I haven't seen anything written about such an enhancement. In years past though many undocumented enhancements have been made, so who knows?

I am using Quicken 2003 Deluxe, and don't see a reason to upgrade. On Amazon, the reviews for both Quicken 2005 Deluxe and Microsoft Money 2005 Deluxe don't inspire any confidence.

Still, I took a (quick) look at the Microsoft Money 2005 Deluxe trial version. I didn't see anything to make me want to switch, but the link is provided so you can judge for yourself.

DrWu said:-I took a loan out of my 401(k). Can you say QUICKEN NIGHTMARE??? I have no idea how to do this. Currently it looks like my 401(k) return % is in the tank because I "lost" all this money. I have no idea how to fix this. I even used their "wizard" to enter the transaction. . .I don't know what happened.

I'm still using Quicken 2002 Deluxe, but I think the same process should still apply.
There isn't an easy way to to this but just think of it in terms of Assets and Liabilities. You will have to use two accounts to reflect correct values. One 401k/403b (or asset) account containing your inventsments and one Loan (or liability) account for the details of your loan against your 401k assets. When ever you do make a payment to the Loan you will have to register it to the Loan account as opposed to the 401K type account.

Unfortunately, Quicken (2002 at least) won't let you link the Loan account against Investment type (like 401k) accounts only Asset or Property type ones. You just don't get the combined Equity graphs, but your 401K value and investments and net worth are reflected correctly.


DrWu said:-For awhile I could never get my 401(k) balance to accurately reflect FMV. After a great deal of searching I finally figured out that in this very tiny menu there are historical prices and somehow a very low futuristic price got in there and was making the balance appear very low.

**It happens. I usually get skewed stock graphs when Quicken fails to download a closing price, but does download the high and low for the day. Imaging seeing a stock price suddenly go to zero. I haven't figured out if this is a Quicken software problem, transmission problem, or a failure on the company providing the quotes.

DrWu said:-Is there a way to accrue expenses?? My property tax is $3,000 a year. I want to be able to recognize a portion of that as an expense each month, but not have it affect my cash. I can't find a way to do this.

I've made most of my bills or expected payments (including the property tax) Liability accounts. I think of them as short term credit line. This way I can display the transactions without resorting to split transations. Then payments are done as credits (transfers) to that liability account. For reoccuring expeses you can setup a Scheduled transation to automatically enter the montly amount into the proper account (you can leave the category blank if you wish). This way Networth is correctly display thought the year. For the Property tax account, I usually will delete those scheduled transactions when the final tax assesment arrives and adjust the scheduled transaction for the up comming year.