Robert from The College Investor here.
I am really excited today to dive into Quicken for Mac 2018.
Now if you remember last year, I kind of ripped on Quicken for Mac.
It was a really bad product and I gave it a one star review and a lot of you guys thanked
me for saving you from buying it, and I really appreciate that.
And so I don't know if you guys knew this, but I shared it with a few of our readers,
but the CEO of Quicken reached out to me after that terrible review last year and he said,
"I promise to make it better.
We're working hard on it and you should really see some awesome results next year".
And so I was really excited to see Quicken for Mac 2018 go live and here we are, and
I want to give them props.
It is much better this year than it was last year.
And it's actually something that I would buy.
Now I don't know about their real price points in the year, but honestly right now at their
40% off price points and I think they're going to have these deals throughout the year and
I've seen it at good prices on Amazon as well.
I recommend it at it's current pricing.
So let's dive in and I'll share with you the biggest features of it, and the biggest thing
that I am super excited about is investment portfolio view and investment lot tracking
and the price point.
So those are the biggest things that really changed in 2014, so you can see here there's
three different versions this year.
There's a starter version for Mac, there's a deluxe version for Mac, and there's a premier
version for Mac.
And I recommend that most people are going to go with the deluxe version.
The only difference between deluxe and premier is that you get bill pay and you get priority
access to customer support.
You can see all the way down that everything else is the same except for bill pay and priority
support.
Now I don't ever recommend that you use bill pay in these programs.
I think there's a lot of glitches.
I think your banks charge you for bill pay and these companies charge you for bill pay
and so I don't really think it's necessarily worth the $15 or more a year if it goes back
to full pricing that you would have to pay to get just bill pay and priority support.
I think deluxe is a great deal at $29.99, but if you notice this, per year.
So Quicken did change their model to a software as a service model where you do have to pay
an annual license fee for it.
And that's why price does matter.
At $50 year here, you know, you're going to start paying $100 for two years, and I would
say most of us that use Quicken religiously, we would upgrade every 2 to 3 years, so I
don't think it's unreasonable that they have a software as a service model, because most
people were upgrading anyways.
But you know, the price can really make a difference when your is a service, so you
know, if you're paying $30 right now, and then you pay it again next year, so you're
at $60, and I think this product is still a good deal at $60 for two years, but you
know, the hard part with Quicken is that you're competing with free.
And so I'm always judging them against what I see at mint.com and personalcapital.com.
And so, the big thing is is Quicken really does improve, so what's new this year is you
can see, you know, it track principal and interest to pay off their loans, that was
a big miss.
The customizable investment portfolio, the assigned lot assignments to investments.
You know, these are all good, but their income and expenses is all much better.
So they really made some big improvements.
So let me know you exactly what they improved on.
So let's pull up what Quicken looks like.
So here we are.
Here is the home page of Quicken for Mac 2018 and I linked some of the accounts up here
so that you guys can get a good sense of what it looks like and how it's changed.
So I would say a few wins right off the bat is that they do have this really nice spending
tracker.
Their spending tracker really updates everything well, and what I've always loved about Quicken
is that they have a ton of categories here.
So unlike mint or personalcapital, which personalcapital recently added custom categories, you know,
mint still is a little finicky when it comes to categories, but Quicken has always been
known for its tracking.
And so you have a lot of categories that you can choose from.
You can edit the categories and it's really great when it comes to budgeting.
And this is really improved from last year.
You can look at your income, you can look at your expenses, you can see a list of all
your transactions.
The only problem I've always found is that, you know, it's hard to get back to.
You have to remember it's these buttons right here are your navigation now, and then you
can view your spending by category right there on the home screen.
You know, I haven't figured out quite where to find it in some of these reports.
You can get an account summary, I think it's category spending ... no, that's not quite
it.
Spending over time, maybe that's it.
Yeah, that's it.
There you go.
You can kind of see those categories which I always love this tool when I was using the
regular Quicken as well.
Of course you can create your budgets and everything, so much improved.
The other area that is significantly improved this year is the investing page.
And it is much much much much better.
So I imported a few of my accounts right here.
And it did a really good job.
You can see the price, the shares, the cost basis, the market value, the gain and loss.
The only hard part is is it didn't import all the cost basis automatically for you.
So I don't know quite what it does to get the cost basis, because all these are reported
at Fidelity, but for some reason, you know, it's putting zero value in for the cost basis
for some stuff, which is weird that it didn't import all the data.
But that's not a big deal because I can go in and I can add these cost basis pretty easily
in this, but that's a big difference from the last one.
And then you can see the lots, which is huge.
So, you know, all the way through you can see all the different lots, if I have any
different lots in there.
Which, you know, once again, much improved over 2017.
Then you can see your portfolio over different time periods, you can see it year to date,
you can see all your transactions for it, and it is just such a better report.
You know, let's see here, you can see your net worth over time, which that's huge.
And then your tax schedule which was always an important one that I feel like was not
very good last year.
Where was the last thing I wanted to show you guys?
The internal rate of returns by portfolio value.
Oh, performance.
So then you can see your performance.
I just imported all this, but if you go to the performance tab on this, you know, it
has everything on there which is really just awesome.
Once again, super significantly improved from last year, and I'm really excited.
I am actually kind of probably going to use this for at least a year and see how this
thing pans out over the long run.
I've updated some transactions, I've categorized my spending and it's honestly so much improved.
Now can I give it a full five star review?
No.
I think I'm going to go with a four star review for Quicken for Mac 2018.
It does have those few things that are holding it back.
You know, this isn't the most intuitive menu.
You could see me struggling where to find some things, and I know some of that comes
with time, but honestly I've been using it now for about three or four days, I should
be able to know where things are.
I still don't know where things are.
You know, I also am really leery about the price.
So if it's at the discounted price I think it's a good deal.
I don't know about paying full price for that.
So I think you should definitely shop around when it comes to the price on this because
you're now moving to the subscription model.
So if it was just a one time fee of paying $49.99 and you got to just sit on this software
for as long as you wanted to, I would say go for it.
But that subscription model really complicates things when it comes to pricing, and so I
think you just need to be careful with that.
So anyways, should you get Quicken for Mac?
If you really want a desktop software version, I think you should try it out.
I don't ... I think you're going to be very happy with how improved it is versus prior
years.
I think you should also note though that I created a whole thing from scratch.
I did not try to import anything from the past, so I've heard in past versions that
importing has always been a challenge with Quicken, so I haven't rated that.
I couldn't tell you if the import was successful or not, but, you know, hopefully that works
well if you're importing your past stuff.
So hopefully anyways you saw this, you found it helpful and honestly I'm giving Quicken
for Mac 2018 four stars, much improved.
Nice job, Quicken.