Wednesday, March 08, 2006

Electronic frustrations

I caved in and bought the $50 Quicken upgrade, which should arrive shortly. The idea of losing the ability to download transactions and stock prices was too much for me. But let's hope the new version works out.
In the meantine, my bank just changed their whole transaction download process. My credit card company was bought by Chase, so now my main bank details and credit card info all come from the same site. But they have changed the way you download credit card transactions and I can't get it to work with my current version of Quicken. I have entered some transactions by hand but I don't want to have to do that on a regular basis, so I hope the new Quicken will fix it.
The other thing that I like to do via download is all my 401k transactions. This currently comes in a QIF file, and I don't think the new version of Quicken will support that. Unless Fidelity makes some changes too, I might be stuck entering almost 20 transactions a month for the mutual fund shares bought with each of my payroll deductions, and any reinvested dividends. This is going to be a big pain in the ass.
I still find investment transactions kind of complicated, and as careful as I am about tracking the number of shares and dollar amounts involved in my transactions, I sometimes can't make things balance. I don't know how people managed when they had to keep paper records of all this stuff.

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

Chase will wack you with somthing called a BKG Software fee for 9.95$ a month to d/l into quicken, so I hope you know someone in a branch that can get it taken off for you...

-Chris
39th/6th ave

Anonymous said...

The fact that Quicken now does not support QIF annoys me enormously, although I like their software. It's only to force banks into paying their subscription fees. It's like WORD refusing to import a text file.

Anonymous said...

For this exact reason I have not upgraded from Quicken 2004. I think I'll stick with 2004 until all the incompatibilities get ironed out.

Anonymous said...

It's hard keeping track of 401(k) transactions for me. My 401(k) provider doesn't show the NAVs easily, so I just keep track of the dollar value. I use other means to track performance.

Dude said...

It seems like they are constantly changing and evolving. Sometime for the better and sometimes not. Hope the new program works for you. Let us know how well it works once you get it going.

Dude said...

I forgot to mention that I posted your link to my blog site. Budgeting is something that I can definitely improve on.
Ciao,

Caitlin said...

I have direct connect with my fidelity accounts so far, but maybe it's their NetBenefits stuff that's still only QIF?

That Chase comment about the fee must be for the banking division, I've never been charged to download my credit card transactions.

but man...if my bank started charging me $10 just to download my own data, I'd find a new bank asap.

mapgirl said...

My 401k plan is so secure, they don't print my account number on the paper statement. Well, without it, I can't download my transactions. Thus I do it all by paper and it stinks.

I'll have to look into Fidelity. Right now I download, but woo. It's going away?