Thinking of buying... comparing to Quicken

[chancee]

I've been using Quicken to manage my portfolio, but one my biggest complaints is I can't create new asset classes for asset allocation. Beyond the basics, such as... International, Large Cap, etc. - they only have 'other' and 'unclassified.'

Would Fund Manager allow me to create, say... 'Real Estate' or 'Commodities?' in addition to the basics?

Also, any insight or comparisons to the two would be helpful. Thanks, Chance.

[Mark]

Hi Chance,

Thanks for considering Fund Manager. Yes, you can do this. In Fund Manager you can have up to 100 asset types, and 100 investment goals. The labels for all of these are user-adjustable. See "Options / Category Labels..." to define the labels for the asset type and investment goal categories.

We don't have a side-by-side comparison against Quicken, but in general Fund Manager is more specialized in tracking/reporting on your investment portfolio. It doesn't do budgets, or keep track of expenses, etc.

[aviator]

Chancee, I am a former Quicken user, so I feel somewhat qualified to comment about Fund Manager.

I used Quicken for about 15 years, dutifully upgrading year after year to the latest version. In the last 5 years or so, their upgrades offered little substantive -- mostly window dressing by changing colors or moving buttons.

I also felt that Quicken got bloated by trying to offer too much to too many people. I've never used their tax planner feature (I have a CPA for that), nor have I used the Home Inventory (a quick walk through the house with a video camera in hand inventories all I need). Quicken appeals to the masses but, in my opinion, does not have depth. But simple things were disregarded like, for example, the ability add asset clases.

I'm not sure how I found out about Fund Manager but I'm glad I did. FM does investments and does them well. (The name Fund Manager is a bit of a misnomer as the software tracks mutual funds as well as individual stocks and bonds.) FM does not do bill-pay or credit card downloads, but it meets my needs for tracking a fairly complex investment portfolio.

I'd encourage you to read this board, which may tell a lot about Fund Manager. Most of the posts here are inquiries on how to do this or that. The Quicken boards, by comparison, were all about complaints. I've found FM (and Mark in particular) to be extremely responsive to the needs of this board, a level of customer service that is, quite frankly, refreshing in this day and age. Intuit's support is extremely limited and, in a word, awful.

I take my finances seriously and I've tried just about all the desktop software packages out there (including the now defunct MS Money). FM by far offers the best value for money.