Mo' Money, Mo' Problems
A little over a year ago, we switched to balancing our checkbook on the computer. I should say that we began balancing our checkbook, rather than "switched" because prior to moving to the PC, we balanced about as well as en elephant on a two-by-four. Sure we paid bills, on time even, but when those cute little bank statements came in with their listing of withdrawals and deposits and cashed checks, they went into The File, never again to see the light of day. We finally made the move to the PC, because with paying for the adoption and saving for college for the result of said adoption, we wanted a better idea of where our money was going . It was tax season at the time, so we managed to get Money 2003 free when we bought TurboTax, or some equally useless tax product. I shouldn't say that the tax program is useless as it's not the tax problem who has a problem answering the very simple question "Do you have a boat?" What can I say? Fear of auditing makes me question my ownership of marine vessels. For one brief moment, I was a boat owning farmer with massive gambling debts. Good times, good times.
Fast forward to a few days ago. I pay some bills online and bring up Money to enter them into the register. Money tells me that my June power bill is overdue, an oddity seeing how the bill I just paid was the July bill. No problem, I probably just forgot to enter in the June payment. Then I notice that there are a lot of things overdue, and not just a month or so overdue, but 390+ days overdue. Then I notice that one of the bills that is overdue is to Ben's old daycare, the daycare he was switched out of in February. I open up the register, and what, to my horror, do I see? Money has lost all of my financial data since May of 2003. Yes, that's right, 14 months of financial transactions, gone.
I thought, this isn't a problem for a saavy PC user like me. Save early, save often, I always say. I'll just restore the trusty backup that I keep on a floppy. Every two weeks or so, Money would ask me to back up my file to a floppy and I religiously agreed as if my PC ever went bye-bye, at least I could restore my data on a new machine. I popped the disk in the drive, hit the Restore button (actually it was a series of menus and dialog boxes, but I like the drama of a big, jolly, candy-like Restore button) and waited. What? Money can't restore the file because there's no space? That doesn't make sense. OK, it's probably trying to restore it to the floppy, silly, silly Money. I'll copy the file to the Desktop and go from there. What? Cyclic redundancy error? What the fuck is a cyclic redundancy error? Give me back my data you soulless harpy!
After several bouts of Googling, I managed to get a data recovery tool to get the file off of the floppy, but still no dice. Money says it's fizzucked. Lovely. As far as I can tell, here's what happened. The last time I closed Money, at some point in the saving process, something went horribly, horribly wrong and fucked my data file. When Money went to start, it couldn't load the aforementioned fucked file, and rather than bother me, the user, with an inconvenient and confusing error message, it just groped around in the dark, found the closest hard disk based backup file and restored it. That file happened to be over a year ago, May 2003 to be exact. Because Money automatically saves when it closes, it saved this file over the "bad" file. I can, to some degree, understand hiding the error message from the user, because God forbid that the customer have to call the fucking customer service center, but Money comes with tools to fix bad Money files. How, exactly, am I supposed to use tools to fix files that I don't know are broken? That last line has a lot more heft if you speak it in a Lewis Black style of mounting rage and thundering yelling. I'll give you a second to read it again. Doo-doo-dee-dee-hum-hum-hum. Done? Great.
Now, this isn't really a loss of financial data as we keep everything from January of the previous year onward, so I have all of the data in bank statements, credit card statements, bills, check registers etc, however I don't have it all in one place, which, unless I'm mistaken (prepare your internal Lewis Black voice) is the whole point of personal fucking finance software! My bank keeps 2 months of transaction data online so once I get some new software I can at least have 2 months of data, but everything else is toast. Truth be told, it Money was good to have everything up to date, but it's cash flow forecasting tool was shit. To Money, every cash outlay was monthly regardless of, in the past month, you paid a certain entity once or 12 times. For example, when doing one cash forecast I nearly crapped myself when I saw that, based on our current salaries, we'd be out of money, and about 30 grand in debt, in 12 months. After some tinkering, I saw that Money had taken some exteremely huge adoption expense that was paid once, and applied it to every month. Far be it from me to tell Microsoft how to make its products, but maybe applying a "monthly" label to something that happened once in a 12 month period isn't the way to go. At the very least, it was a thrilling experience akin to riding a roller coaster, but without the long theme park lines or vaguely unsettling, anthropomorphic waiting line entertainment.
As a result of this fiasco, I am now in the market for a new personal finance software package. I'm thinking QUicken, because a) it's not Money and b) it's the only other one I know of. I'm sure there are other, possibly better ones out there, but I don't run Linux or have a Mac or want to develop a personal relationship with Karl the developer because I'm one of his 5 customers. I am a child of duality, and the possibilty that there may exist a third, equally viable but lesser known choice for my purchases fills me with unease. I mean, RC cola? Down that road lies madness.
Fast forward to a few days ago. I pay some bills online and bring up Money to enter them into the register. Money tells me that my June power bill is overdue, an oddity seeing how the bill I just paid was the July bill. No problem, I probably just forgot to enter in the June payment. Then I notice that there are a lot of things overdue, and not just a month or so overdue, but 390+ days overdue. Then I notice that one of the bills that is overdue is to Ben's old daycare, the daycare he was switched out of in February. I open up the register, and what, to my horror, do I see? Money has lost all of my financial data since May of 2003. Yes, that's right, 14 months of financial transactions, gone.
I thought, this isn't a problem for a saavy PC user like me. Save early, save often, I always say. I'll just restore the trusty backup that I keep on a floppy. Every two weeks or so, Money would ask me to back up my file to a floppy and I religiously agreed as if my PC ever went bye-bye, at least I could restore my data on a new machine. I popped the disk in the drive, hit the Restore button (actually it was a series of menus and dialog boxes, but I like the drama of a big, jolly, candy-like Restore button) and waited. What? Money can't restore the file because there's no space? That doesn't make sense. OK, it's probably trying to restore it to the floppy, silly, silly Money. I'll copy the file to the Desktop and go from there. What? Cyclic redundancy error? What the fuck is a cyclic redundancy error? Give me back my data you soulless harpy!
After several bouts of Googling, I managed to get a data recovery tool to get the file off of the floppy, but still no dice. Money says it's fizzucked. Lovely. As far as I can tell, here's what happened. The last time I closed Money, at some point in the saving process, something went horribly, horribly wrong and fucked my data file. When Money went to start, it couldn't load the aforementioned fucked file, and rather than bother me, the user, with an inconvenient and confusing error message, it just groped around in the dark, found the closest hard disk based backup file and restored it. That file happened to be over a year ago, May 2003 to be exact. Because Money automatically saves when it closes, it saved this file over the "bad" file. I can, to some degree, understand hiding the error message from the user, because God forbid that the customer have to call the fucking customer service center, but Money comes with tools to fix bad Money files. How, exactly, am I supposed to use tools to fix files that I don't know are broken? That last line has a lot more heft if you speak it in a Lewis Black style of mounting rage and thundering yelling. I'll give you a second to read it again. Doo-doo-dee-dee-hum-hum-hum. Done? Great.
Now, this isn't really a loss of financial data as we keep everything from January of the previous year onward, so I have all of the data in bank statements, credit card statements, bills, check registers etc, however I don't have it all in one place, which, unless I'm mistaken (prepare your internal Lewis Black voice) is the whole point of personal fucking finance software! My bank keeps 2 months of transaction data online so once I get some new software I can at least have 2 months of data, but everything else is toast. Truth be told, it Money was good to have everything up to date, but it's cash flow forecasting tool was shit. To Money, every cash outlay was monthly regardless of, in the past month, you paid a certain entity once or 12 times. For example, when doing one cash forecast I nearly crapped myself when I saw that, based on our current salaries, we'd be out of money, and about 30 grand in debt, in 12 months. After some tinkering, I saw that Money had taken some exteremely huge adoption expense that was paid once, and applied it to every month. Far be it from me to tell Microsoft how to make its products, but maybe applying a "monthly" label to something that happened once in a 12 month period isn't the way to go. At the very least, it was a thrilling experience akin to riding a roller coaster, but without the long theme park lines or vaguely unsettling, anthropomorphic waiting line entertainment.
As a result of this fiasco, I am now in the market for a new personal finance software package. I'm thinking QUicken, because a) it's not Money and b) it's the only other one I know of. I'm sure there are other, possibly better ones out there, but I don't run Linux or have a Mac or want to develop a personal relationship with Karl the developer because I'm one of his 5 customers. I am a child of duality, and the possibilty that there may exist a third, equally viable but lesser known choice for my purchases fills me with unease. I mean, RC cola? Down that road lies madness.
posted by Brandon at
8:45 AM
