Martin Lee @ Sg
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Microsoft Money Plus Sunset

I have been using Microsoft Money for many years to monitor my personal finances and investments.

The bills tracking facility is useful as it allows me to enter recurring billings, and keep track of all bill payments so I will never miss a deadline.

The customised reports allow me to see at a snapshot all the assets and liabilities in my balance sheet (and over time), as well as evaluate my investment returns (both actual and annualized) across different products and accounts.

Last year, Microsoft announced that they would no longer be supporting the Microsoft Money line of products. There were too many competitors providing similar products and it’s no longer worthwhile for them to keep developing it.

I tried to search for a suitable product that I can migrate my data to but it wasn’t exactly successful. There were a few online services (like Mint) that catered more to the US market. Some of these were really good as the data can be streamed directly from the bank accounts to the service providers so there is minimum data entry required.

Can’t find something similar and good for the Singapore market though. I guess our market is too small.

Quicken is probably one of Microsoft Money’s greatest competitor. I wanted to buy it but it’s not even available for sale in Singapore (nor from their website)!

An opensource GnuCash looked interesting as it uses double entry accounting for tracking but the data migration from Microsoft Money looked to be a nightmare.

So now, I’m still stuck with Microsoft Money. It still works fine so maybe I will just stick with it. I know most people probably use excel for simplicity. What personal financial software do you use?

About a month ago, Microsoft released a downloadable sunset version of the Microsoft Money products.

It is designed as a replacement product for expired versions of the Money line of products. The download worked even if you did not have a previous version of Microsoft Money installed on your computer.

If you like to try out Microsoft Money to monitor your personal finances, you can download them at the links below:

Money Plus Sunset Deluxe

Money Plus Sunset Home and Business

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Leave a Comment:

12 comments
tattooedbanker says 13 years ago

I use http://www.budgetpulse.com.

Not as full featured as mint.com, but its free and works well for me.

Reply
    lioninvestor says 13 years ago

    Hi tatttooedbanker,

    Thanks for sharing.

    Nice blog you have there. 🙂

    Reply
Danny says 13 years ago

Quicken is available for sale on Amazon.com. Not too expensive.

Reply
    lioninvestor says 13 years ago

    Hi Danny,

    Thanks for the tip!

    But looks like they only sell to US customers.

    Downloading: Currently, this item is available only to customers located in the United States and who have a U.S. billing address.

    Have you tried ordering before?

    Reply
      Danny says 13 years ago

      No, I haven’t bought downloadable software from Amazon, but I think you can buy the boxed software and have them ship it to Singapore via SingPost’s vPost service.

      Reply
Charles says 13 years ago

Hi,

have a look at moneydance.
I had been with MS Money since 1998 and it was the only reason for me to have a Windows PC untill 2009 when I finally found a replacement on my Mac: MoneyDance

MoneyDance is supported on Windows, Mac, Linux and it could import all my 10 years of transactions without a hitch (I did have to adjust all the currency exchange rates for transfers between accounts of difference currencies as I have roughly 1 such transaction per quarter).

AFAIK the one section where MoneyDance is not so great is in tracking investments and especially Options.
But for tracking expenses, incomes, bills, it is what I was looking for.

(and one more issue: it cannot import my credit card statements in OFX but only in QIF; but that is because my banks issues my OFX statement for credit card as a positive transaction but of course Moneydance takes it as a negative one)

Go and check their website and forums.

Charles

Reply
    lioninvestor says 13 years ago

    Hi Charles,

    How did you export the data over?

    For Money, you have to export each individual account as a QIF file. I have dozens of accounts and that process alone can take up a lot of time.

    Reply
      Charles says 13 years ago

      I also had more than 20 accounts to export

      I have looked many times and have never found any solution that does not require a QIF export (gnu, Quicken, Mint, etc all go through a QIF first); sorry to be the bearer of bad news

      Reply
        lioninvestor says 13 years ago

        So sad, I have more than 50 accounts! I don’t even want to start. lol

        Reply
Shangbin says 13 years ago

Hi Martin, a topic that I really love myself too! I’ve been using the PearBudget’s spreadsheet for couple of years already. Like it a lot, primarily because it’s free. The authors now have a web-version (https://www.pearbudget.com/ and reviewed at http://financialsoft.about.com/od/onlinesoftware/p/PearBudget_web.htm) that costs a bit of money, while one can still download the free spreadsheet here: https://www.pearbudget.com/spreadsheet and reviewed at http://financialsoft.about.com/od/morefinancialsoftware/gr/PearBudget.htm.

Basically I like the PearBudget spreadsheet because it is simple and free. However, if you are looking at a better budgeting software, you should check out You Need A Budget (http://www.youneedabudget.com/), and especially the four rules of budgeting:
(1) Stop living paycheck to paycheck – work towards saving enough firstly to sustain on the previous month’s income;
(2) Give every dollar a job – kind of like zero-based budgeting;
(3) Save for a rainy day; and
(4) Roll with the punches – when you overspend this month, the software will indicate you will have to cut your spending the following month.

I like YNAB’s budgeting concepts. The software used to cost US$19.95, then US$29.95, and now it’s US$59.95. It was spreadsheet then evolved now to an application.

Purely from a budgeting perspective (that means excluding tracking investments and other form of assets/liabilities), if one is willing to pay, to go for YNAB, and if not, to go for PearBudget spreadsheet.

Shangbin

Reply
    lioninvestor says 13 years ago

    Hi Shangbin,

    Thanks for sharing about the pearbudget tool you use!

    For those who just want to track their budget, a spreadsheet might be good.

    One can also use cloud computing to upload their spreadsheet to google docs.

    I believe goggle apps have quite a few budget templates as well.

    Reply
AceMoney says 13 years ago

Try AceMoney, I like it’s simple interface, yet full of features (at least all those that I need). I have never use MS Money before, so I am not sure how it will stack up against MS Money.

Anyway, they have steps on how to migrate from MS Money, http://www.mechcad.net/products/acemoney/import-from-microsoft-money.shtml if you are interested.

Reply
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