http://news.cnet.com/8301-13860_3-10261742-56.html
You know, I have mixed feelings. I use Money 2002, because the newest versions were way, too bloated with bells & whistles. (Plus I already had a license and I didn’t wanna pay any more, especially after trying the trial period of 2007.) I religiously put my data into Money, but it has only been able to actually accurately do a couple things: Make pie charts of our spending categories, and provide a history of transactions better than the bank. After a year, it *sort of* predicts future cash flow & net worth, but applies it to the wrong accounts.
Completely useless were the areas where I was supposed to “Build my portfolio”, as all my various TIAA/CREF, Fidelity, American Funds, etc., are broken down into at least 15 if not more different actual “Funds” that have a stock symbol. I never took the time to meticulously add them in, except for once I tried it, and Money got the numbers all wrong. Yeah, yeah; garbage in, garbage out; but should it BE so complicated that I can’t “Just Do It”? So… Scrap the investment tracking.
The newest version of Money even went so far as to offer to automatically connect to ALL my accounts and download daily updates. It reminded me of the robust, vast array of drivers available in NT 4.0 Server: Though a huge list of providers appeared to be available, none of them were used by me, so that feature was useless.
Yeah, its sole purpose has pretty much been to see “Gee, how much did we spend on diapers THIS month?” but even such granularity could not be obtained, since diapers are always mixed in with other purchases that got labeled “Household” or “Groceries”.
I don’t know if 2007 or whatever the latest version has this problem, too, but money is also very bad at guessing what category a transaction should be if it has any type of unique number in it whatsoever, which 90% of them do. Very annoying.
So, in conclusion, I guess the only major thing I’d going to lose is the ability to see where spending has been in the past.
