Ready to Take Control of Your Finances?

We're a little more than a month past tax day and maybe your checkbook is still stinging. Maybe you were also frustrated by your lack of organization as you sorted through records needed to fill out all those forms. If you've decided not to put yourself through this next time, your computer can help.

I had been using Intuit's free online service, Mint.com, but it doesn't have the features needed to organize expenses at tax time and I wanted to take a look at Mint's big brother, Quicken, which offers substantially more features.

Quicken is the standard by which personal finance managers are judged. Not even Microsoft Money could compete. Microsoft introduced Money for Windows 3.0 in 1991 and 17 years later announced that no new version would be released. Less than a year later, Microsoft announced that it would end development of Money. Product activation servers used for Money were deactivated 2011, making it impossible to install or re-install Money (unless you have a cracked copy).

Quicken is facing new competition these days from mobile devices and is responding by developing mobile apps of its own. The mobile tools haven't received particularly good reviews, though, and Intuit will need to move quickly to retain its market share.

For those with complex financial situations, there's no substitute for Quicken. If you have two lists (one that describes what Quicken does and another that describes what Quicken doesn't do), the first would be enormous and the second would be tiny. If you can't do what you do in Quicken, you need a CPA.

Quicken Premiere does a lot of things I don't need or even understand, but that's the version I installed. Most of us will do just fine with Quicken Deluxe (the most popular version) or with even the $30 Starter version.

The Starter version imports and manages bank accounts, creates budgets, and sends bill-pay reminders. If that's all you need, you might consider Mint, Intuit's online product.

You can set up several types of accounts for Quicken to track: spending and saving (checking, savings, credit cards, and cash), property and assets (home, vehicle, and miscellaneous assets), loans and debt (loans, home equity loans, and miscellaneous liabilities), and investing and retirement (brokerage, 401(k) or 403(b), IRA or Keogh, and 529 plans).

Then you can import, download, or manually enter transactions from your accounts. Quicken uses the information to analyze and categorize your spending and to calculate your net worth. You can also sign up for online banking and pay bills electronically. Quicken will even remind you when due dates approach.

Quicken also provides planning tools, tax tools, and reports that allow you to set goals and the use built-in calculators to gauge your ability to meet the goals. There's a tax estimator and a tools that helps you to identify deductions and estimate capital gains (if you're a person who has capital gains).

Quicken's user interface continues to make information available in straightforward ways. The default home page (dashboard) is easy to navigate. You'll find the essential information from the past month there, but you can customize the view. Select from several reports and graphs that show upcoming events, expenses for the year, income for the year.

The left vertical pane (mostly obscured in the image) lists active accounts and your current net worth. The top toolbar has only three tabs in addition to the Home page: Spending, Bills, and Planning. Links in the upper right provide access to information about your synchronization with mobile devices (you can send data to the Quicken Cloud, to be picked up remotely) and any active alerts (e-mail and texts can alert you to events like unusual spending, low balance and over budget).

You might think that Quicken is simple and limited. Not so. Once you start looking around, you'll change your mind. For example, the Spending tab gives you access to the tools you'll need to manage and track income and expenses in detail.

Highlight a transaction and change the category it's assigned to or add categories. You can also split the transaction, enter notes and attach flags, void it, or "memorize" it for later use.

After you've defined the various accounts you want Quicken to track, you can update everything with a single click.

The interface makes everything look easy, but that doesn't mean you can just install the program and start using it without some instruction. Intuit offers a quick-start explanation. Use it to make the most of the program.

One of the features that I like about Quicken is its ability to show detailed information about a transaction when you hover the mouse cursor over the transaction.

Month-to-month and year-to-date summaries can help you stick to a budget.

Use the Bills tab to have Quicken remind you when bills are due or use Quicken Bill Pay to make payments electronically.

Still the leader for detailed financial information

Although many financial management apps are available for tablets and smart phones, they all have limitations when it comes to the amount of data that can be made available. Intuit has begun to make information from Quicken available to tablet and phone apps and this migration is certain to continue. If you're a hard-core mobile user who detests desktop applications, Quicken probably isn't what you're looking for, but if you're the kind of person who wants the maximum possible amount of information about your finances at your fingertips and you're willing to have your fingertips touch a desktop or notebook computer, it's hard to imagine a better application than Quicken.
Additional details are available on the Quicken website.

A Torrent for the FCC

Apparently the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has been hearing a lot about Chairman Tom Wheeler's plan to "save" net neutrality by allowing broadband companies to charge more for premium service. The push back has been so strong that members of the commission are asking Wheeler to postpone consideration of his new plan, currently scheduled for review next week.

Wheeler says that his proposal won't allow broadband providers to create a "slow lane" but will allow them to create a "fast lane". This seems to be an exercise in semantics and not a very good one. When you're on the freeway, do you view one lane as the "fast" lane and the other as the "faster" lane? Or do you see a slow lane and a fast lane?

In a speech this week, 1 of the 3 Democrats on the 5-member commission, Jessica Rosenworcel, said that there's been so much response to the proposed rule that the commission should delay action.

I've said that this isn't a political issue, or at least it shouldn't be. This week a listener sent me a link to a column in the Detroit Free Press, but the link wasn't to the newspaper's site. Instead it was to "gopusa.com" ("GOPUSA is not affiliated with the Republican National Committee. GOPUSA is a private company whose mission is to spread the conservative message throughout America.") Here is a link to the article on the gopusa.com site.

Liberals and progressives are concerned about proposed Internet changes. So are conservatives and libertarians. Anything that gives corporations the ability to push communications into the "less fast" (aka "slow") lane is a threat to everyone.

The Free Press article, titled "Why You Should Be Worried About Net Neutrality" says: This is what it all comes down to: What do we want the Internet to be -- a private luxury, or a public utility? Keep in mind that the FCC regulates cable television and telephone service largely because they're deemed essential services. It's difficult to make the case that Internet access is less essential to modern life.

Last month, FCC Chairman Wheeler said that he wants the commission to consider what he calls "Open Internet rules" at its meeting on May 15. There would be no final decision then; the commission would simply determine whether to put the proposal out for public comment. The final decision would come later.

Tens of thousands of people have communicated with the FCC and most of the communications, including mine, have been in opposition to the plan. Wheeler apparently plans to proceed with introduction of the proposal, but there may not be enough support on the commission for it to move forward.

The fast lane/slow lane discussion has been confused with quality of service. Here's the difference:

Some network traffic needs to have higher priority than other traffic. Video and audio, for example, won't work well if those streams are interrupted or slowed. Good network management gives those types of streams precedence over standard Web pages and e-mail, for example, because a 10-second delay in an e-mail won't be noticed. That's just good network management.

What the broadband providers want is to create a "fast lane" that would give precedence, for example, to Netflix streaming video over other video because Netflix paid extra. That is not good network management and it would give broadband customers (the people who pay those big broadband bills every month) less reliable and less usable service unless they're willing to use only the content from those who are willing to pay more.

Commissioner Rosenworcel says the FCC needs to allow the commission's legal experts to review the proposal and to review comments that the FCC has received. The question seems to be whether citizens believe that net neutrality has any value and, if so, whether the FCC should enforce it.

"I think it’s a mistake to cut off public debate right now as we head into consideration of the chairman's proposal," Rosenworcel said, calling for at least a one month delay.

The commission's Republican members have said that they oppose net neutrality requirements. Amazon, Google, and more than 100 other software, social-media, and technology companies have signed a letter to Wheeler saying that they oppose the plan that would create a fast lane. Some of the others include Dropbox, Ebay, Etsy, Facebook, Foursquare, LinkedIn, Microsoft, NetFlix, Reddit, Tumblr, Twitter, and Yahoo, along with a bunch of start-ups that don't have the money to pay for fast-lane service. Oddly, Apple didn't sign the letter.

Short Circuits

Amazon Sunday Deliveries

Remember when the US Postal Service wanted to shut down Saturday deliveries because they cost too much? Well, now the USPS is working the Amazon to provide Sunday deliveries in some cities.

Last Sunday two Amazon packages for me were delivered on Sunday, but because the office was closed, they had to be brought back on Monday and one of them, although reported as delivered, disappeared into Neverland.

If you live in one of these cities, you might receive a package from Amazon on Sunday: Indianapolis; Lexington and Louisville, Kentucky; New Orleans and Shreveport, Louisiana; Cincinnati and Columbus, Ohio; Oklahoma City; Philadelphia; and Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, Austin, Waco and College Station, Texas.

Amazon first offered this service in New York and Los Angeles. The company seems to think that this will attract more customers and might be the glue that binds Amazon Prime members to the service, which now costs $100 per year instead of $80.

Amazon also allows Twitter users to add products to their Amazon carts without leaving the social media site. And, of course, there's the Prime Pantry service for groceries in some cities.

Sunday delivery is available to all Amazon customers who live in the served areas.

Microsoft Pulls XP Owners' Bacon Out of the Fire This Time

Microsoft stopped supporting its 13-year-old XP operating system and then Heartbleed hit. Microsoft provided a security patch for XP and security advisor Graham Cluely says that was a bad idea.

Delaying the inevitable, he wrote, makes it more likely that XP users will continue to put off upgrading.

This coming Tuesday is Microsoft's official monthly patch day and there will be no updates for XP users. The patches issued that day will undoubtedly fix some security issues. Issues are identified and fixed every month, but no longer for XP.

According to Cluely, "it would be no surprise at all if malicious hackers reverse-engineered Microsoft's fixes and explored how to exploit on Windows XP security flaws that are fixed on the likes of Windows 7."

This shouldn't be a surprise to anyone. Microsoft has been warning loudly for months that support for XP would end. And before that, the XP end-of-life date hadn't exactly been a secret. Yet tens of millions of computers are still running XP.

Cluely puts it this way: It's time for the world to get rid of Windows XP. And it's time for Microsoft to make an honest clean break and not release any more fixes for XP.

Big, Pricey Solid-State Drives Are on the Way

SanDisk has launched what it calls the world's first enterprise-class 4TB solid-state drive (SSD) and says that an 8TB model is on the way. With solid-state drives that large, the only thing standing in the way of universal acceptance is the price.

The company says it has Optimus MAX 6TB and 8TB drives in the works for next year.

SanDisk isn't talking about prices, but Seagate offers an 800GB (0.8TB) SSD for $6600. What would a SanDisk drive more than 4 times as large cost? Certainly $10,000 or more. But solid state drive prices are coming down and it's likely that SSDs will eventually replace drives with spinning platters.

Just not this week or next. Or next year. And maybe not this decade.