I have a hate-hate relationship with Microsoft Money. Or rather, with it’s delivery mechanism. I’ve railed on this before more than once. You’d think I would have learned my lesson but here I am, once again, with a new computer that needs a new copy of Money 2008 installed and me without my installer…

One of the “problems” is that I upgraded from version 2006 to 2008 late last year. This was because Money 2006 stopped updating prices for my portfolio automatically and I figured it was because my 2-year dealie thing had expired. Alas, upgrading to version 2008 didn’t work and it was only through their support centre (which, I will freely admit, was extremely helpful) that I was able to get that feature working again.

Now 2009 brings the hillbilly a brand new desktop and the *only* application I’ve had any issues installing is Microsoft Money. Everything else, both paid and unpaid, went off without a hitch. ReSharper, SmartFTP, VisualSVN, FoxIt PDF Creator. Each of these (paid) products I was able to get up and running the same way:

  • Download from their website
  • Install
  • Search my Inbox for a license key and enter it

(It should also be noted that every single one of these products is more expensive than Microsoft Money.)

But Microsoft Money has a download limit of 30-days. After that, you’re out of luck unless you purchased the extended download service, which gives you access for up to two years. During my attempts to fix this, the helpful folk at DigitalRiver.com said I could purchase said service after the fact but try as I might, I simply can’t figure out how, even with the instructions they sent. (I could e-mail them to ask but in my most recent reply, I was a little too sarcastic and told them I’d rather eat glass than buy it.)

Enter Quicken as the most viable replacement. Except that you can’t download a trial version. And for software that manages my money, I like to see what I’m getting first. The Twitterati has made a few alternative suggestions, like Yodlee and GnuCash but personal banking is a pain as it is in the Bahamas and I’d like to stick with software I’m reasonably familiar with. Plus, the automatic price updating seems to be a missing feature in both of those.

Note: it could be argued that this is all my fault. I read the terms and conditions and was fully aware of the 30-day download limit and shouldn’t have deleted the set up application. That’s very true. I have a habit of downloading to my desktop, then cleaning house on a regular basis and my memory for this sort of thing sucks. As it turns out, over the course of writing this post, I did end up finding the original download (which I had mistakenly filed under the Visual Studio 2005 Macros folder). So I no longer have anything to rant about. But the practice is still very much outdated and should be reworked so I’m going ahead anyway.

Kyle the Vented