March 2012: Quirks in jobless data could bite Obama

I read an article I wanted to share while researching the formulas on how the jobless rates are calculated. 


SUMMARY:
Several Wall Street economists believe the government is mismeasuring seasonal shifts in the labor market, and suggest the jobless rate's sharp winter drop was partly an illusion.

"We think that the improvement over the last few months dramatically overstates the underlying improvement," said Andrew Tilton, an economist at Goldman Sachs in New York.

The government uses computer programs to filter out seasonal changes like the drop in construction jobs every winter. But because the computer programs make adjustments based on what happened in the recent past, the millions of jobs lost during the winter of 2008-2009 may have tricked the machines into expecting the winters that followed would be similarly bad.

And when the raw data for jobless rates did not rise as much as expected this winter, the computer programs appear to have over-adjusted the data downward, resulting in big drops in unemployment


Here is the article that goes into how the jobless rates are calculated:
Analysis: Quirks in jobless data could bite Obama

Quicken 2010 Broken by R10 Update (Replaced by MS Money)

I have been using Quicken 2010 since MS Money was declared defunct from Microsoft.  It was a sad day for me as I really grew to love MS Money.  However, it had to be done (or so I thought at the time), so I bit the bullet and got a copy of quicken.

Bottom line, my experience with Quick over two years was frustrating at best.  One of my biggest complaints is that it had SO much trouble matching downloaded transactions to those in the register.  Even if the difference was a day, or the amount was off even by a cent; the damn thing would not match properly.  Once you accept a wrongfully matched transaction, there is all manor of hoops to jump through to correct it.  Then your balance is off until you do. Grrr...

There are more complaints, but I will not go into them.  Update R10 for Quicken 2010 was released, and I applied it in March 2012.  Long story short, it broke Quicken to the point of uselessness.  I was infuriated, and anyone that has tried it knows, that Quicken support sucks donkey muffins.

So what was I to do?  I rely on a mechanism like Quicken to track my cash-flow, billing dates, and transactions.  I began a new hunt about 11:00 p.m. one night and looked for all the alternatives.  The choices are:

• Mint (online)
• Quicken (online)
• Quicken 2012
• others I would not use
• MS Money Sunset

 Wait.  What was that last one?  I thought MS Money (MSM) was defunct?  With more digging I found out that MS was kind enough to hand off a "sunset" version of Money.  This version is basically the last code version of Money, minus any online updates or transactions.

You can download it here:  Money Plus Sunset Deluxe (download)

You can still import your banking statements into MS Money (sunset), but you have to do it manually.  MSM also has a plugin that will automatically import any MSM formatted statement (.ofx or .ofc).  However, note that your bank must serve up the information in the correct format.  I have read a little about converting Quicken (.qif) formats into MSM format to facilitate imports...

I have used MSM for a few days now, and while it does not have as many features as Quicken, nor any online services; MSM is a great replacement.  I will forgo any update to Quicken until I find that I cannot use MSM anymore.

There are a lot of features I like about MSM over Quicken:

• Cash forecast more usable
• Bill reminders more functional
• Better automatic transaction matching (from downloads)
• Reporting is much more simplified
• Faster

 Give MS Money Sunset a try, you may just be pleasantly surprised!