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: