Received Quicken Premier from Amazon yesterday, and installed it. The import of the MS Money file was less than perfect, and left many transactions out.
I had been using MS Money for many years, but only for its Portfolio Manager features. In fact, I used to use MS Portfolio free Web version, but it eventually could not handle all the equity transaction history that dated back to 1998, and I had to buy MS Money Plus to continue to track my portfolio.
A long time ago, I did buy an earlier version of MS Money to use it for all banking purposes, but the set-up was cumbersome, and the darn PC crashed shortly after due to a Windoze bug, and I never bothered to set it up again. Meanwhile, my wife does her own electronic banking to pay bills and all my involvement there has been simply to make sure there is enough money in the checking account.
Anyway, the import of MS Money file was botched, but it could be due to some weird records inside the file. The darn thing was 287MB (yes, that's 287 Megabytes), and had choked up MS Money itself on occasions. Yes, I have been an active investor, but what could have been stored in that bloated file?
So, I gave up on the import and set out to create accounts from scratch. It was painless to set up Quicken to go into my B of A, Scottrade, Schwab accounts, etc, etc... There remained half a dozen of accounts that I will have to enter by hand, Treasury Direct and my wife 401k being examples.
Now, I know my net worth again each day after the market closes. That pleases this miser.
But, but, what the heck is this? Apparently, Quicken could not go back far enough to see when certain stock shares were purchased. However, it "knows" the shares are there in the balance, so creates a "place holder" for the purchase transaction, and I will have to look it up myself to edit the date and the price. Arghhh.... And of course there is no way I would spend the time to enter all the dividend payouts.
Also, all the closed positions, all those "historical" tech stocks that I bought which have gone belly up, they had been wiped clean, and no evidence of any of my dumb investment mistakes remains. I had been keeping them, so that I could look back and see how many tens of thousand I lost on this, and on that... A guy's got to learn from his mistakes, or at least tries to, don't you think?