I hate Quicken, 2003 version

I hate Quicken.

But I’ve used it for years because it was better than MS Money, which was the only other game in town. Quicken crashes frequently and causes more problems on my computer than any other program I use. Once it lost some data, but they Intuit Support insisted that it was some other program’s fault and so I had to pay for the tech support call. And they couldn’t get my data back, sorry about that.

It’s almost tax time, and the latest Turbo Tax has a new activation requirement so it can only be used on one computer and one tax form. It’s also causing a lot of problems: The current user reviews on C-Net are at 92% negative with 133 votes. Many can’t get it to install, others are crashing. So I considered switching to Tax Cut. (Side note: There’s one particular form I need this year and neither of their web sites will tell me if the form is included or which version of the program I might need but to get the right form.)

The pricing is all based on rebates. If you buy Turbo Tax then you get Quicken free. If you buy Tax Cut then you get MS Money free. So before getting Tax Cut I decided to download the 60-day trial version of Money and see if I could go to it. It easily imports Quicken data with just a few click. Yeah, sure. Easy for them to say. I’ll admit that my Quicken file is fairly complicated since some of the data had to be coerced into the program’s format in the early versions of the program, but only about 70% of the data went across correctly into Money. Going back and forth between the two programs allowed me to find some of the errors, but it would be a 80 hour process to fix all of it. Especially since one or the other of the programs keeps crashing; usually Quicken takes over all the memory and then Money starts having problems.

So I’m stuck with Quicken, which implies using Turbo Tax because of the rebate structure. It is definitely not worth paying for an upgrade to Quicken and it needs to be upgraded every year to use the online features such as getting stock quotes.

Now I hate Quicken, Turbo Tax and MS Money. I’ll probably never know on Tax Cut.