Quicken on steroids
Quicken is an amazing software. Really. It does all sort of things for you -provided you feed it with the right information. It tracks your spend, your portfolio, your credit cards and bank accounts. You can categorize all your expenses, so that you know where and how you spend your hardly earned money. You can do all sort of reports and analysis, plot charts, pay bills, set budgets and check how are you doing against them.
Yet, it lacks one important thing. At least important to me. It is not able to tell me whether I am doing well or not. OK, if I am putting aside a few hundreds dollars a month in savings, then I presume I am doing well. But how well? Say I earn 100,000$, and I am saving 5,000$ per year. I presume I am doing pretty well. US saving rate is just around zero, so I must be doing pretty damn well. Or maybe I am not at all. Maybe Americans that earn 100k a year are able to set aside 10 grand. If this is the case, I am probably spending above the average. It doesn’t mean I am doing something wrong, but this would be a nice piece of information to have. To know that I am saving less than what comparable people are would be a nice thing to know.
You can do more. Say you are earning x, and have y in savings, with a family so and so, and monthly expenses so and so. Say you don’t own a house, but want to buy one. Say you expect to earn j for the next many years. Here’s the question: what is the house that you can afford given a certain appetite for risk, your financial condition and prevailing mortgage conditions? And how much people in similar situations have decided to spend in the house? It would be a nice -and useful- thing to know.
How much equity do I have? Is it above or below the average of my peers? And cash? Bonds? What about the pension I am building?
Car - too expensive? How much will it cost to me in the next 5 years? More or less the one I have now? Say I want to buy a Porsche. Can I afford it? or I have to cut on something else? Or even more simply: can I afford a car?
Children education - enough cash? Need a loan? How long to repay it? and how much does it stretch me? What share of my spend will it be? Am I as generous as my peers with my children?
Am I overspending on vacation? and technology -sorry, wrong example. You can’t overspend on technology 
All these sort of services would add a “social” component to Quicken. Not a-la-facebook, not really. Yet still somehow social. I think they would provide extremely useful information, and help Quicken users take better informed decisions, and possibly avoid dangerous mistakes.
There is probably one quite big obstacle at doing this, which is privacy, or, better, users’ probably low propensity at sharing such information, even if in an anonymous way. I am not sure whether users can overcome such fear, yet if they made it, this would allow to turn a great product into something really special. Also, it would build some barriers to entry for the competition, and would probably change users’ perception of the product. From an accounting and budgeting software, into a personal consultant, and source of all sort of information extremely helpful in managing our financial life.
What are you waiting Intuit?
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[…] Schoolhouse Beat: The Blog wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerpt Quicken is an amazing software. Really. It does all sort of things for you -provided you feed it with the right information. It tracks your spend, your portfolio, your credit cards and bank accounts. You can categorize all your expenses, so that you know where and how you spend your hardly earned money. You can do all sort of reports and analysis, plot charts, pay bills, set budgets and check how are you doing against them. Yet, it lacks one important thing. At least important to me. It is not […]