Quicken 2019 for Mac Review

See my Quicken 2020 for Mac Review for the most recent review.

I have been using Quicken to manage my finances since 1989, making this my 30th anniversary with the program. Though I started on a Mac, and use a Mac today, the vast majority of my use has been on Windows. A little over two years ago, I switched to the Mac version of Quicken which I wrote about here.

As I wrote then, I had very high expectations for the Mac version under new leadership, independent of Intuit, and the financial benefit of a new subscription-based business model. In this post, I’ll share an update on how it’s gone using the latest version of Quicken, Quicken 2019 for Mac. …

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Happy Birthday, Patrick O’Brian!

Patrick O’Brian, the author of the Aubrey-Maturin seafaring novels, would have been 104 years old today. Mr. O’Brian passed away in 2000 but left behind a treasure of twenty meticulously researched historical sea novels set in the British Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars. The books center on the friendship and adventures of its two main characters: Jack Aubrey, a British naval officer, and Stephen Maturin, the ship’s surgeon, naturalist, and part-time intelligence agent. …

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Eartec Wireless Radios – The Marriage Saver

Lisa and I have celebrated 22 wedding anniversaries. For at least the past dozen years, we haven’t exchanged gifts beyond small tokens like flowers or chocolates. Instead, we go out to dinner, just the two of us, to celebrate the occasion. This year we celebrated at May’s Kitchen, a Thai restaurant on Vashon that is so good, it is worthy of special occasions like anniversaries. As we were heading out the door on our way to the restaurant, Lisa surprised me with a package.

“Wait, what’s this?” I asked with apprehension. She was breaking tradition. “I didn’t buy you a gift.”

“Don’t worry. It’s for both of us. It’s a marriage saver,” she replied with a cryptic smile. …

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A Sailor Crosses the Bar (Part Two)

After two decades of sailing, we have crossed over to the dark side.

A few weeks ago we bought a powerboat, a Nordhavn 43 trawler, that we’ve named Indiscretion. She isn’t a typical go-fast stinkpot kind of powerboat. Her cruising speed of 7 knots isn’t far off from sailing. We won’t win any races. But she’s a stout little ship, with the displacement and hull design to withstand open ocean conditions, and an engine and fuel supply to take us from Seattle to Hawaii on a single tank of diesel. A sistership circumnavigated the world a few years ago. We don’t expect to cross oceans, but we do have plans to go places that require blue water passages, up to Alaska or down to Mexico, and going there in a boat that can handle just about anything provides real peace of mind. …

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A Sailor Looks at Crossing the Bar (Part One)

When I was starting out in public accounting, nearly thirty years ago, I got the chance to work for a new partner who had just joined our firm. His name was Joe Sambataro, an Italian-American from New Jersey, full of blunt honesty and character, and we hit it off right away. He became an important mentor and eventually recruited me to join a small staffing firm in Tacoma as a financial analyst when he joined as CFO. He would later retire, then come back as CEO. Joe is now the Chairman of the Board of this multi-billion publicly traded staffing firm.

Back when I first began working for Joe, he shared three wishes for me: Marriage, Mortgage, and a Boat. In that order. He figured that an employee with a spouse and a mortgage would stick around longer than a single guy with no ties to anything. The boat, he said, was just for fun. Joe liked boating and especially fishing off a boat.

I took Joe’s advice and in short order got married to my beautiful wife Lisa, and signed a mortgage on our Vashon Island home. I soon began looking for a sailboat. …

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