Banking & Saving

Quicken – Losing its Luster?

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Money Management Tool - Free and Easy to Learn! Having used Quicken for longer than I’ve been married, it’s a shame to see my long-term relationship with the program start to deteriorate.

Before the advent of online platforms like Mint.com (now owned by the makers of Quicken), personal finance management software was limited to a handful of options: Excel, Money, or Quicken.  Even after more choices emerged, the capabilities of these new program were mediocre compared to those offered by Quicken.

Since I’d established a history with Quicken and was dubious of entrusting ALL of my financial information to any one online service, I stuck with what I knew.

Aggregation & Automation make money management easy and effective.  Using Quicken’s “One-Step Update”, a single click downloads your financial transactions from all your institutions.

Because Quicken did all of the grunt work, more time could be dedicated to: scrutinizing inflows and outflows, creating budgeting plans or savings goals, reviewing investment performance, and so on.

But… it seems once flaws are noticed, more begin to emerge.

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The Costs of Pet Ownership

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Dog with Sunglasses

Do you have a furry friend at home?  And know how much it’s costing you?

… starting to sound like a bad daytime show theme:  “Did your ex-boyfriend ditch you and his puppy-gift, leaving you with the costs? Coming up next!”

Dog with SunglassesUnfortunately, that’s often how pet ownership begins – on a whim.  But after reading an article on Forbes titled, My Dog’s Life Cost $36,846.24, it got me thinking how the decision to become a pet owner is like any other investment and should not be taken lightly.

The ASPCA compiled a chart outlining the costs of pet care.  These costs represent the minimum for “humane care” and clearly note you should expect to pay more than what is detailed.

Using the basic information, a medium dog will cost you a minimum of $695/year not including the initial $565 start-up costs.  So at a bare minimum you will spend no less than $7,500 over the course of 10 years.   Upgrading to a large dog will increase that bottom line by $1,800.

Remember the ASPCA only captures the minimum for humane care.  The Forbes’ author spent almost 5x those projections so it wouldn’t be unreasonable to use a 2.5x multiplier as a truer average cost.  If you add this new premium, those baseline costs soar from $7,500 to $18,750.

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Bank Fee Fiasco

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Following the financial markets meltdown, banks are under increasing pressure to act more responsibly whilst rebuilding confidence in the financial systems and rebuilding their financial strength.

However, with many of the apparently easier ways to make money now gone, banks are resorting to ever more clever ways of earning fees.

Savings rates (linked to Reserve Rates) are at record lows. Real savings rates are negative, as inflation runs at much higher rates. Careful savers are being penalised by seeing the purchasing power of their money reduced over time.

Banks respond by using term savings products that encourage savers to fix savings into one, two or up to five year terms, meaning that they lose ready access to their money and have to take a risk on where future money cost rates will go.

Banks have increased both the frequency and amount of fees being charged. Now it is common place to have administration fees for services that were once free. Application fees, for example, are also being charged for loans or mortgages.

Obtaining a credit card has also become much harder. Even the number of balance transfers deals that were once common have reduced. But for the customer with a good credit history, this can be an excellent way of reducing the very high charges levied by banks on debt balances.

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How to bank cleverly

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The development of the financial markets over the past twenty years has led to a wide range of products and services that can help us handle all our money matters. Sometimes the choices are bewildering and sorting out the essential from the desirable and the best value from the expensive can be devilishly hard. Furthermore, … Read more