explanade
Give me a museum and I'll fill it. (Picasso) Give me a forum ...
- Joined
- May 10, 2008
- Messages
- 7,442
Found an old thread and it seems the people who posted don't trust software with their logins and passwords.
http://www.early-retirement.org/forums/f27/financial-software-users-48124.html
I had the same distrust of online services like Mint so I looked for native software, for Mac OS X. Even then, I was leery but I was updating a spread sheet manually, copying balances from logging into at least a half dozen sites. The tedium of doing this meant I wasn't updating the spread sheet as frequently as I probably should (once every month or two).
Obvious choice is Quicken, the most widely-supported application. But I didn't like that in addition to providing login/password to my accounts, it required a Quicken account including address and other personal details.
So I didn't really evaluate it, instead trying iBank, Investoscope and SEE Finance. Investoscope doesn't pull data, you have to enter shares and symbols manually but even when I did that, it wasn't showing the balances. iBank pulled data but the balance it got for VG account was plainly wrong and I couldn't make it right.
SEE Finance had the same problems initially but then I downloaded to QFX and imported and it was fine. It had problems with some other accounts though including some which didn't export QFX files like some other institutions. So I had to enter these manually.
In the end, it got pretty close to my spread sheet so I'll try updating the data a few times after DRIP and other transactions on the accounts.
One thing it won't do is an AA calculation across all the investments in the different accounts. Seems like VG is the only one but not all Other Investment Accounts that you set up at the VG site update by themselves, so that's not always current.
http://www.early-retirement.org/forums/f27/financial-software-users-48124.html
I had the same distrust of online services like Mint so I looked for native software, for Mac OS X. Even then, I was leery but I was updating a spread sheet manually, copying balances from logging into at least a half dozen sites. The tedium of doing this meant I wasn't updating the spread sheet as frequently as I probably should (once every month or two).
Obvious choice is Quicken, the most widely-supported application. But I didn't like that in addition to providing login/password to my accounts, it required a Quicken account including address and other personal details.
So I didn't really evaluate it, instead trying iBank, Investoscope and SEE Finance. Investoscope doesn't pull data, you have to enter shares and symbols manually but even when I did that, it wasn't showing the balances. iBank pulled data but the balance it got for VG account was plainly wrong and I couldn't make it right.
SEE Finance had the same problems initially but then I downloaded to QFX and imported and it was fine. It had problems with some other accounts though including some which didn't export QFX files like some other institutions. So I had to enter these manually.
In the end, it got pretty close to my spread sheet so I'll try updating the data a few times after DRIP and other transactions on the accounts.
One thing it won't do is an AA calculation across all the investments in the different accounts. Seems like VG is the only one but not all Other Investment Accounts that you set up at the VG site update by themselves, so that's not always current.