Discover, iBank Woes and a Fix

If you’re using iBank financial software and have a Discover card which was assigned a new card number, you may no longer be able to download transactions. This happened to me. Here is the fix:

• Select the Discover account
• On the top menu, click “Account”
• Select “Disable Account Access”
• On the top menu, click “Account”
• Select “Setup Account Access”
• Enter your Discover user id and password
• Click Download Transactions
• If all is well, your transactions will download to iBank

I had a bizzare transaction download called “Transfer of Balance”. To get my accout right, I entered a transaction for this amount with the sign reversed and my iBank Discover account is now correct.

Discover, this was a pain in the a**. You did not post iBank instructions, only Quicken and MS Money. I was able to figure out what to do after reading those. Discover, not everyone is stuck with a Windows pc. Don’t “diss” your Mac customers.X

Mint and iBank Financial Software for OSX

It’s been a while since I wrote anything about my search for personal financial software for my Macintosh.

Mint, a financial web site, works with any OS. I’m using this site once a week or so to get an overview of where I’m spending. My family income is easy, I have a job and so does Gary. I do like this site and I recommend you check it out. It’s free. Now they are adding investment accounts. I’m in the beta program, I’ve used it all of one time so far. There is a great view which lets you see performance of your investments vs. the Dow or S&P or Nasdaq as a multicolored line chart. Extremely cool.

iBank, an OSX financial program. This is my electronic checkbook and credit card account tracker. It can import Quiken .qif files, which my bank and cc card web sites can produce and download. This program works well, worth the $60. It can save your data in an encrypted form (do this!, especially if you use a laptop) requiring a password to open the datastore. The UI is pretty and very Mac-like. iBank has an investment account piece which I have not been able to figure out, but that’s not what I’m using it for. If you use OSX and have had problems with Quicken for Mac, try iBank. I think there’s a limited free trial.

Why Malware is Avoidable on Macs

The Unavoidable Malware Myth: Why Apple Won’t Inherit Microsoft’s Malware Crown — RoughlyDrafted Magazine via kwout

Interesting article explaining that malware such as viruses, adware, spam bots, etc are a major problem on Windows and not on Apple Macs. The reason is the poor quality of Windows.

TurboTax: Windows-to-Mac OS X Works Great!

A while back I published this post on problems I had moving Quicken from Windows to Mac OSX.

This weekend I crossed my fingers and bought TurboTax. Both Windows and OS X versions came on the same CD. I installed it with no problems on my mac book pro. It took a while to download and install updates – no problem, I just did something else. The real test was: Would it import last year’s return from the file produced by the Windows version. Yes!! It did so flawlessly! Good work Inutit! I guess the TurboTax developers care about cross platform data portability, and the Quicken team does not.

This saved me lots of time. Once I was able to find my financial records and figure out the cost basis of some securities I sold, my tax chores went fine – as long as I don’t think about how much of my property the federal and state government are extorting from me. My income is my property, just as yours is yours. Since we absolutely own our own bodies and use them to earn our income. This is true whether we do manual labor or intellectual tasks.