Money Plus

If you are considering upgrading to Money Plus (aka Money 2008) from Money 2007, don't bother. There is nothing there you need. In fact, it appears exactly the same to me... except for something called Insights, which I will get into below.

I have been using Microsoft Money for about a year and a half now. It does what I need it to do, track account balances, credit card balances, retirement, budgeting. Really the only complaint I have with it is the advertising. People that advertise in something you pay for really irk me! Movie theatres are the worst offenders here. Anyway, it performs its function halfway decent so I use it.

Money Plus recently came out so I figured I would upgrade my software. I like to keep up to date on software. The upgrade went okay, it appears nothing got corrupted in the process. I started Money Plus up and looked around a bit... its exactly the same!

Okay, so I found one new feature. A stand alone application called Insights. This is a tray application that you can pull up to quickly glance at things like budgeting and balances. But it's very cumbersome. In order to see balances you need to select a single account from a drop down and view them one by one. This is very inefficient. The budget page is a little more useful but offers you nothing over launching Money and looking at the home page.

Furthermore, Insights is a huge security risk. To use Insights you need to enter your user name and password to launch the application. It just sits there in your tray monitoring balances and updates. But you can launch Money from the tray icon! What is the point of password protecting Money if there is a huge security hole like this. My point is Insights gives you nothing better than the Money home page... and the home page is way more efficient at getting the information you want.

The only reason I can see someone purchasing this is if your 2 year online download capability is about to expire or you are brand new to the product. If you are not in either one of these two categories save your money.