shahine.com/omar/

I love Mint.com too. A Windows Mobile app would do fine for me.

I'd looked at Mint before at your recommendation (I'm also frustrated with Money, and even more fed up with Quicken before that), and found it to be woefully insufficient. Now it's just kinda insufficient, and once they get their investment stuff up, it'll be almost entirely sufficient (and if they can just put in loan functionality -- I want to see amortization schedules! -- then it'll be 100% sufficient). Even with that lack, though, it's still looking better than Money for day-to-day use and budget tracking.

I think it says something about how badly the Money team has screwed up (or, I guess, how little Microsoft cares about Money) that a personal finance site with no investment or loan capabilities is still easier-to-use, more useful, and just overall better than their program.

Hi Omar,

With regard to services like mint.com, are you not worried about security? If a hacker breaks into such a site, would he not get all your private financial info?

I think the biggest problem with Money is that Microsoft never really focused on fixing some of the extremely annoying bugs in the product and many of the "features" just weren't all that compelling. One annoyance came when I attempted to set up a student loan after graduating only to learn that Money doesn't allow adding disbursements prior to the date the account is created in Money.

The final straw came when I attempted to open a set of Money files that I hadn't opened for a few months only to discover the same bug in payment schedules still existed two years later. The files are perfectly fine, but Microsoft Money puts itself into a tizzy when attempting to update payments schedules that haven't been updated in a while.

The last time this happened, I spent the better part of a summer afternoon on the phone with Microsoft Support applying various patches and downloading applications to delete the scheduled payments. When the same problem happened two years later, I decided it wasn't worth the hassle and uninstalled Money.

Omar,

I agree that MS Money is garbage. I have been using it for 5+ years and it seems to get worse every year. We could go on and on about bugs, UI, features, etc., but the fact that it is license (psuedo subscription software because of limited update support) software and chalk full of advertisements drives me nuts.

I would love to switch to Mint and have followed it since launch, but it lacks so many critical features that I (and other power users) require. They have certainly made massive improvements and have gotten a lot of stuff right, but I think they are at least 1 year off. Omar, I don't understand how you have switched!

To name a few critical items...
Data portability - importation/exportation of Quicken/Money/QIF files - I am not going to switch over to an unprofitable start-up, scrap years of historical financial info then not be able to get my info out. They do allow export of individual account transaction info into a csv file, but what a joke.

Investments - finally they have added the category, but if you want to see anything other than your account balance it says "This feature is currently being built and will be available to all mint users soon." That is absurd! Who monitors the overall balance of their investment account and not individual investments. That requires that I visit many rather than one site - completely defeats the purpose.

Manual entries - They do not allow you to add accounts manually or enter transactions manually. If they don't support a bank then you are out of luck. If you want to enter a transaction manually then you are completely out of luck.

I am really rooting for them, but until they make their product more robust I am stuck with MS Money.