Financial software users

[Florida]

Do you provide Quicken or others with your user names and passwords to your accounts?
or do you download from your bank to the software?

What concerns may you have about providing such information into cyberspace?

 

[donheff]

I don't use it anymore but when I did, I manually downloaded data. The idea of centralizing all of my financial user names and passwords in some central repository is pretty scary. MS pushed that concept with Passport and a lot of financial sites offer to track all of your investments that way. No thanks.

 

[Coach]

I use both Quicken locally installed and Mint and have stored logins on both. I've never worried about Quicken. I checked out what the Mint has to say about security and decided that the risk was tolerable, but I sure can understand why some people don't feel the same.

Coach

 

[Rustward]

I don't do it.

Having said that, any service that would transmit or store your financial account userid/password data in the clear (not encrypted) would be in violation of a lot of standards for that kind of data. I would expect that the major players (and probably the not-so-major players) that do this kind of thing are independently audited for compliance periodically.

Having said all that, breaches do occur, mistakes happen -- these systems are put together by humans.

 

[W2R]

Like Rustward, I don't do it. In my case, this is probably due to my old fashioned ways as much as anything. I have always done this type of thing by entering the data manually into Excel, I feel comfortable with Excel, and I want the flexibility and control that I associate with Excel. A couple of times I looked at Money and Quicken, and (valid or not) I didn't like what I perceived to be a lack of flexibility. I didn't like sending my info off like that, and also I am far too [-]cheap[/-] [-]stingy[/-] frugal to sign up for software with recurring charges if I can do what I want in some other way.

Recently I switched from Excel to Open Office, but really it has the same type of flexibility and control over the calculations that I like. I don't use either to automatically download anything - - I enter the numbers manually.

 

[Alan]

I'm a manual entry guy

 

[easysurfer]

I purchased an intuit product a few years ago and got a letter saying that my CC info was one of the people that was on one of their laptops that got stolen. The good news they said was that the laptop was password protected and they gave one of those free cc monitor services for a year.

I don't use Quicken anymore, but sometimes I do think "what if" security got compromised where I keep other financial accounts (bank, VG, etc.)