Hello everyone, this is the Angry Systems Administrator. The annual nightmare known as “Tax Season” has once again come around, like a bad case of dysentery, and now we must begin the annual game of figuring out how to keep our hard earned money in our own pockets.

For the last 15+ years, I’ve been using Turbotax, made by Intuit. This has been due to the complexity of my personal investments and figuring out things like Capital Gains and loses. I’ve also been using Intuit’s Quicken for far, far longer.

While I have to upgrade Turbotax each year, I’ve generally only updated Quicken every 3 or more years. However, the corporate greed-heads running Intuit have decided now would be the perfect time to abuse their monopoly. They are forcing everyone who currently uses Quicken into a subscription model whether they want to or not.

I saw this last year and decided not to do an upgrade until I had no choice. Well, the “No Choice” point has been reached. I was notified that Intuit would break the version I’m currently using so I won’t be able to pull in my financial data from my banks and investment services.

Yesterday, I pulled the pin and when I ordered this year’s copy of Turbotax, I also ordered the upgrade to Quicken. I expect to have them both in hand in the next few days. (I prefer ordering the Media rather then just a download. They can’t take that away from me)

I’ll probably install both products next weekend, AFTER backing up my current data files. Then it will be the usual conversions and connection processes I’ll have to wade through. It’s sad that I, and millions of others, are being forced to upgrade at the point of a virtual gun. There are no other decent competing productions.

I’m continually looking at the Open Source application called GnuCash, but the tools used to connect to your financial institutions still are a royal pain to configure, and they don’t always work. I’m hoping that someone will finally write a module that will allow a simple connection set up and then automatically build the account inside GnuCash. Once they do that, Quicken will be facing a real threat to their monopoly.

Thatisall