Bond Maturity Report

mwada

I just purchased Quicken Deluxe for Mac and can’t find the Bond Maturity Report. Do I have to purchase Premier to have this report?

I also have another question. I am using Quicken 2016 for Windows. I have been using it for many years and it is to the point of being unusable. Being, between each investment transaction there is a delay. A search, reveals this normal. I can’t use it like this so I was going to just stop using Quicken but there isn’t anything out there that comes close to Quicken.

Moving on to the Mac version. I imported the data from Windows and now there is no delay between transactions but I only did a few transactions. Can I expect not to have this delay with the Mac version?

mwada

Thank you for the confirmation about the Bond Maturity report. That is one of the features I really needed. It also made the decision a lot easier. I will be requesting a refund. I was hesitant of starting a subscription for Quicken but got interested when I found out I could retain my past data and input investment transactions without a delay. I guess I will stick with my Windows non subscription Quicken and maybe just start from the beginning with a new file and hopefully this will fix the delay between investment transactions. Yes, this will create more work/time but there are no alternatives. I already have a Mac Numbers file to track my bond and CD maturity so I really don't need Quicken if starting a new file turns out to be too much work.

jacobs

@mwada If you already have a spreadsheet to track your bond maturity, I'm not sure I understand why the absence of such a feature is a deal-breaker for using Quicken Mac? (I do understand why an integrated bond maturity report would be a useful feature; I'm only questioning why this would keep you from using the software if you already have a way to track it externally.)

mwada

You bring up a good point and that same question/questions crossed my mind which may not be easy to answer. The spreadsheet was done after I decided that I was going to stop using Quicken for Windows because of the delay after entering an investment transaction. I guess the question can also be asked here, like what is the big deal with a 3 to 5 second delay after entering an investment transaction? An investment transaction also includes entering the interest from each bond biannually. It is a big deal to me.

I have never downloaded any transaction and not only don't I have any use for it, I don't trust it in many ways. Yes, I don't have full trust from the source of the data so it would be an even bigger concern with a third part having access to the account. After saying this, yes I hate entering the data manually. I should do it monthly with each statement but I always put it off and end up doing it every 3 months. And, every 3 months I say I will never do this again. I have been saying this for the past 5 years.

By the way, I have been using Quicken forever that I can't remember when I started but I started using Andrew Tobias Managing Your Money, Microsoft Money, and finally Quicken. I also have tried using other money programs that doesn't come close to Quicken. If anyone can recommend a Mac money program that has a bond maturity report I would appreciate it. I want a dedicated computer data storage program (no cloud based) and hopefully non subscription.

I use Quicken for only a few reasons but I do like the integration with everything financially. I have no use for budgeting but the data achieved from that is part of the investment side of Quicken. I like to see that everything financially balances out. I only need Quicken for investing and tax reporting. What I am leading to is the "time" portion of entering and maintaining the Quicken data is a bigger investment than the price of paying for the yearly subscription. Put those two together and the question comes up, do I want to invest any more of my time plus pay for a product that is incomplete? The answer now, is a biased "NO". The only reason I am still with Quicken is because I be would throwing away my "time" investment. I hope that answers your question.

My turn, why do you continue using Quicken? Your answer may "unbiased" me.

jacobs

@mwada That's a good and fair answer. We all use Quicken differently, and should it become more work than the value you feel you're getting from it, it's time to consider other options.

But many people look at other software and discover the inevitable truth: every other program has its own costs and shortcomings; if the features of an alternative better align with your needs, it become a viable choice, but if you'd be trading off some gains for some losses in functionality, perhaps not.

For me, there are a few reasons I remain tethered to Quicken. I love the ability to have all my financial data, from investments to bank accounts and credit cards, gathered and viewable in one place. Could I piece this all together separately in a spreadsheet? Sure. But Quicken makes it easier. I also love having all my financial history in one place. I love not needing to know which credit card I may have used to buy something years ago if I need to find when I made that purchase. I love being able to quickly answer questions from "when did we last place the hot water heater?" to "when was the first time we went to that restaurant" to "how many bags of mulch did I buy for the garden last year" to "how has our electric bill changed over the past decade" — because all my transactions and documentation form nearly three decades exist in one easily searchable database.

I actually enter all my data manually; I started that way back before there were online downloads, and I just never switched. Sometimes when there are a lot of credit card charges in a month, I think maybe I should change my ways, but every time I've dipped my toe into downloading (I've done it in a separate file I maintain for beta testing), I find I spend almost as much time editing Payees, adding memos, creating splits, adding tags, etc. as it takes me to just enter transactions manually. And when I'm tempted to add my investment accounts for downloads, I read on this forum of all the time-consuming disruptions people experience with various outages with financial institutions and I fall back to being content to enter things manually. I enter my investment data either monthly or quarterly, depending on the brokerage account statements I receive. In does take me some time each quarter, but I also use that time to take a good look at my holdings to see if any adjustments are in order. Of course I could do that if I downloaded, but in my approach, it's built into the calendar so I don't sleep on reviewing things.

I never suggest that other users forgo the usefulness of downloading transactions to do it the way I do, but my approach works well for me for managing our finances. (Someone who has many more accounts, many more investments, or many more total monthly transactions would likely find my manual approach not to be a viable one.)

My 90-something parents still use Quicken, but they don't record every credit card transaction, or every investment transaction. My father (a retired accountant) keeps an investment "net worth" list on paper, and finds that's good enough for his needs. But when I moved them from the old Quicken Mac 2007 to the current Quicken Mac, one thing he really missed was the ability to generate a year-to-date budget-versus-actual report. I built a somewhat complex Excel spreadsheet which allows them to export Quicken's inadequate budget report, paste it in its entirety into the spreadsheet, and print a proper YTD report from the spreadsheet. So, like your situation needing to keep track of bond maturity, that's a case of needing to use an external tool to make up for a shortcoming in Quicken Mac. But once I built the spreadsheet, it takes about 15 seconds a month to generate the budget report. And hopefully one of these days, the Quicken development team will get around to building a proper YTD budget report and we can retire the Excel spreadsheet… just as they'll hopefully some day build a bond maturity report.

I'm not trying to reverse your bias towards leaving Quicken, only sharing how and why it works for me. I hope that's helpful. As I wrote at the outset, we all use Quicken differently; we have different needs, different accounts to manage in our personal finances, and different features we consider crucial. For all its imperfections and missing features, I find Quicken is useful in managing my financial affairs, and is worth the cost and time I spend on it. 

mwada

Thank you for your Quicken experience. Your experience is an inspiration and it did change my bias towards Quicken but at this time, not enough to subscribe to the service. I share many of your Quicken experiences but with less passion. You bring up a good point about having to compromise to make something whole and I partially agree but there still needs to be a buffer or incentive to try and make Quicken make it whole on their own. I appreciate you sharing your experience with everyone.