Thanks for posting the review. What would you say are some of your favorite features of Money/the ones you most frequently use? I've had MS Money 2002 on my computer, which frankly I have used only sporadically. Recently, I tried Quicken 2005, but found in it some of the same things that have irritated me about Money - I guess these personal finance programs really aren't perfect, so I'll have to learn to live with their shortcomings! Having spent a few hours playing around with Quicken, and then reading a number of on-line reviews, I made the decision to go back to Money, since the 2005 version seems to be somewhat superior to Intuit's software. So now I'm giving it another try... I ordered a copy from Amazon (a great price, btw, after the rebate), so I look forward to giving it a try.

Here are some of my favorite features:

- Online Transaction Download: This definitely saves time in bookkeeping (not all banks offer online download though)

- Lifetime Planner: an easy-to-use tool to see how your financial decisions year-over-year can drive net worth growth

- Customized Reports: I can export reports to Excel for further tabulation and analysis.

Hope this helps.

I checked out Money 2005, and Quicken 2005 and didn't find a lot of reasons to upgrade. There is a little more support for online banking, but not enough to justify the cost of the upgrade. I read the reviews on Yahoo Finance and they all thought the same thing. I think they need to come up with a solution that is 100% online. It would be nice to access all your data from anywhere, not just where you have the software installed.

I have been using MS Money 2003 for about 2 years now with no problem. The reason I did not upgrade to 2005 is because they had a clause that online transaction download will be disallowed after 2 years. Thus you will be forced to upgrade every 2 years.

I just got Quicken 2006 and have been fiddling with it for the last few days. I think it's actually the better product now, so I hope folks will consider it. I actually had the 2004 version but refused to upgrade last year. I just didn't think it was worth it. But I love some of the improvements they implemented this year.

For example:
- you can automatically have credit card transactions that are downloaded in to your report renamed as you wish
- you can get one click views of recent transactions in the same category or to the same vendor
- you can attach copies of your receipts (scanned) to the Quicken transaction to ensure that you don't lose it in case you need to reference it again
- electronic bank receipts and bills can be saved as well

Net: If you don't have a personal finance software program, consider Quicken. If you have 2004 Quicken or earlier, upgrade.

PS I should state that I would probably not advise switching from Money just yet. I did so years ago and it was a hassle. I guess it's just not in Intuit or Microsoft's interest to allow easy switching between personal financial software.