No, that's not as in "faster than light". That's as in gamer-speak "For The Lose". Intuit has just announced that effective April 30, they're not only terminating technical support for Quicken 2005 which in itself is fair enough), but they're disabling online services that are (a) working perfectly well and (b) between you and your bank anyway. And they're not making any real effort to hide the fact that their motivation in doing this is to force remaining Quicken 2005 users to upgrade.
"Nice financial management process you've built up for yourself here. Be a shame if anything were to happen to it. Know what I mean?"
Project to complete by April 30: Migrate to GnuCash, or Moneydance, or ... well, anything but Quicken, really. If my software is still working, the vendor should let me continue using it as long as it continues to work, not intentionally break it to force me to give them money.
Update:
mrmeval linked here, and noted GnuCash and MoneyDance as alternatives. So I thought I'd comment that I've actually been evaluating MoneyDance for some time. I actually need to go see if there's an update to the version I downloaded, but in playing with it so far, I've found it to work very well. There are just two issues I've discovered to date that I consider to be strikes against it:
- The register has no bottom "fiill-in-the-blanks" empty line for new transactions. Every time you want to add a transaction, there is a distinct menu-bar action required. This is annoying because it's an unnecessary extra step on every transaction that adds nothing functionally. In essence, MoneyDance is failing to follow the register metaphor in this instance. (If you're used to finance programs that use such a bottom blank transaction for transaction entry, you may also find yourself futinely attempting to scroll down further to get to the bottom of your register when in fact you're already there.)
- Somewhat more seriously, MoneyDance uses a double-entry accounting model, but MoneyDance's double-entry model is implemented in a way that makes it impossible¹ to recategorize a transaction after it's already been entered. This could be a problem if, for example, you accidentally mis-categorize a transaction, or discover after the fact that a certain class of transaction is in fact tax-related (or has just become tax-related due to changes in tax law).
[1] This is directly per MoneyDance tech support. I asked them how to recategorize a transaction that had already been entered, and they told me, "You can't."