MS Money 2004 Expired…
1st January 2007
I’ve been using MS Money 2004 for about a year and a half now. For the most part I like it. It’s relatively simple and keeping our finances up to date have been relatively easy. That just got harder to do however since Micro$oft decided that the online functionality should expire…
The program strated nagging me in early December that it was about to expire. In true ‘Personal Finance Blogger Fashiontm‘ I ignored it. Then about a week ago, the accounts I had set up to be retrieved automatically stopped being retrieved. This wasn’t a big deal for many of our accounts, I could still download and import the transactions. For Discover card and our 401Ks though it because a huge pain in the butt since there is no easy way for me to do so.
So over the last week I researched the differences between Quicken and Money. Initially I was going to jump to Quicken because I am so pissed that M$ would just turn off this feature for no good technical reason. As it turnes out however, Intuit has a similar policy of sunsetting their software after three years. Interestingly enough, many of the reviews for every version of Quicken and Money since 2004 have said that the upgrade wasn’t worth buying…
I also looked at some of the free/open source financial tools (decent but slightly dated review here). Of those Moneydance seemed the most mature but it isn’t free. The trial version allows for 100 transactions to be entered which is a good way to get a feel for the application. To have unlimited use of the program it’s $29.95. With rebates you can get Money or Quicken for that price which makes more sense to me.
So I placed an order for MS Money Home and Business 2007. I got Home and Business because it has an invoicing tool and allows for tracking of business expenses better. Money 2004 was not really suited to this task (even though my business was simple enough for it to work.) Hopefully in three years when this version of Money expires, some of the open source applications will have advanced enough for me to use instead. If so, MS and Intuit can kiss my business goodbye.
January 1st, 2007 at 3:19 pm
Did you consider any online solutions? It seems from your post that you only considered desktop software.
Account aggregation services, offer many of the same features as the desktop programs for free or at low cost and are accessible from anywhere on any computer. Also, they are constantly updated.
The leading one is Yodlee MoneyCenter and you may want to try it out. http://moneycenter.yodlee.com/
January 1st, 2007 at 3:21 pm
Weird. I have Money 2003 and it hasn’t expired.
I used MoneyCenter. It’s free and it works great. http://moneycenter.yodlee.com
January 2nd, 2007 at 12:23 am
It looks like the 2004 versions were the first to exhibit this “feature”…
I’ve used Yodlee through HSBC. Not sure if it is the same service. While it’s nice, I like having access to our accounts offline as well as on. Plus, I’ve always had a nagging worry about having all of our account information online in one place.
January 5th, 2007 at 5:22 pm
I have been sticking to using the ole fashioned Excel spreadsheet.
My accountant has been able to import all my tax stuff into his software. I’m not sure off-hand what software he is using.
I would consider looking into creating Excel spreadsheets. I guess this won’t help with your invoicing issues but could be a good solution for others frustrated by MS Money
January 14th, 2007 at 8:27 am
I might just. I’m not entirely happy with the new version of Money. It screwed up some of the imports I did which cost me a ton of time fixing the categories and transfers.
Excel seems like it would work but would be more of a hassle to keep up to date though. I was very happy with Money 2004… :/
March 28th, 2007 at 5:36 pm
Wow. Well, my copy of Money 2000 is still chugging away. The Internet Updates stopped working in the past year but that is no biggie. I guess I should clean things up and install Money & Business 2003 some day soon. I’ve been putting it off. I will do it when I move everything off Windows 98 SE onto my Windows XP SP2 box. Heh.
March 31st, 2007 at 8:09 pm
I feel your pain (and then some?)! I upgraded from Microsoft Money 2004 to 2006 last year, and completely regret it. I did not have any expiration type stuff, though, so maybe I would have ended up needing to upgrade eventually, anyway. I just upgraded because I got a good deal on 2006, since 2007 was about to come out.
The upgrade corrupted my main money file, which had all of my transactions in all of my accounts, including detailed memo fields for many of them, since sometime in 2001. I did have backups, so I tried the import/conversion several times, in an effort to figure out what it was choking on, and try to sidestep that. No luck, though.
So, I ended up wasting *hundreds* of hours, doing all sorts of manual and semi-manual conversions to get everything matched up and usable. During the month or so that I spent trying to recover from this disaster, my bill paying got thrown off, I didn’t even notice that I didn’t receive 2 paychecks, and I believe my checking account got overdrawn at least once. But, I eventually got things into a somewhat usable state — enough so that I could handle my day-to-day stuff reasonably well.
Still, most of my memo fields were lost (I use these once in a while for searching for things like ‘did I get the 75,000 mile maintenance done on my van, and if so, when?’, but lost about 6 years worth of that capability now), most of my account registers have grossly inaccurate balances shown, dates on transactions are a bit off, my payee names are only about half-normalized, there are duplicate transactions all over the place, transfers from one account to another are often not properly represented, etc.
Anyways.. upgrading from Money 2004 to 2006 was a very frustrating experience for me, and I will not dare upgrade again unless/until they put a gun to my head (which will probably occur around 2009, right?).
April 4th, 2007 at 1:20 am
Just remember to uncheck the check for money updates box near to / after the expiry date of the online services. My copy of Money 2003 Deluxe & Business is still fully functional because I don’t let money update itself and turn off the functionality. It did once and I had to use a system restore point in XP to undo the changes it made. I also had copies of the directories money uses to replace any files that it may have changed so I could restore the unmodified files. I am now well into 2007 and money shows its last update as Feb. 2006 and all is still working.
April 11th, 2007 at 7:24 am
[…] Anyways… After BoA bought Fleet, they immediately changed the terms of the card, making the interest rate go back up to something-teen-point-something. Ugh. A year or so later, BoA finally assimilated the Fleet card into its online banking system, though, and it did, in fact, speed up the charge-to-website time. It also gave me back a feature that the Fleet website had taken away at some point — the ability to download transactions from the currently open billing period into my personal financial software (MS Money, <a href=”http://www.my-personal-finance-blog.com/2007/01/01/ms-money-2004-expired/#comment-14495″>the subject of another rant</a>!). That was nice. It also allowed me to now make payments to the Fleet card (now a BoA card) much faster, and I could even do instant cash advances from the card, in the event of an emergency, directly into my checking account. This came in handy a couple times. Yes, the fees are horrible for that, but still better than dealing with overdraft/NSF hell! […]
September 9th, 2007 at 1:39 pm
To keep Money 2004 downloading, just change the system clock to 9/1/07 (or the date your copy expired if earlier), then start Money and login, then change system back to current date, then download transactions. This has worked so far since mine expired as of 9/2.