Smith and Noble apparently sold me out

Dear Smith and Noble,

I am awash in catalogs, and it seems you may be to blame.

In this age of e-statements, digital activity, and online correspondence, I expect very little to arrive via snail mail. And yet my mail is overflowing...with catalogs.

At first the catalogs were a slight annoyance. It was something like you automatically signing me up for your catalog after I ordered some window coverings online. I suppose you wanted to stay "top of mind" even though you clearly were top of mind before the catalogs started coming.

Then the catalogs started reproducing. Suddenly I was getting other catalogs, some of them really thick wholesale catalogs, for no apparent reason. It seemed the primary function of my mailbox was to be a temporary holding place for catalogs as they moved from mail carrier to recycling bin.

Today I learned that it will be nearly impossible for me to stop receiving catalogs, and perhaps you are partially to blame. I called Home Decorators Collection's customer service number and asked to stop receiving their catalog. Seemed simple enough. Then I asked if I could somehow end back up on the list, presumably the same way I ended up there to begin with. She said yes.

Using the Key # on the catalog, she acknowledged that Smith and Noble gave my address to them. And probably countless other catalog companies.

If this is true, this is disgraceful. I buy something from you, and you turn around and sell me out. In fact, you may very well keep selling me out, even back to good ol' Home Decorators Collection.

No more. As I tweeted earlier today:

Apparently Smith and Noble is one of the reasons I am receiving so many unwanted catalogs. I will NEVER, EVER buy anything from them again.

-joanie

P.S. I just called your customer service number to opt out of receiving your catalog. As I was leaving my name and address per your instructions, your system abruptly stopped me and said that it couldn't record my information. Then it hung up on me.

(A longer version of this post appears on No More Catalogs, a blog intended to stop unsolicited catalogs from showing up in our mailboxes.)

Intuit makes me want to cry

Dear Intuit,

I used to love you. The joyful sound of the cash register bell that confirmed each transaction made money management fun. I loved making pie charts, watching my hair color expenses trend with my entertainment spending, and seeing neatly rectified statements each month. Tidy.

Fast forward twelve years. I've got legacy data miles long that has been corrupted through each Quicken upgrade, moved back in time 100 years in my first upgrade post "Y2K," and otherwise neglected as life grew in complexity.

Putting aside the hours of manual data correction I've done (and paid to have done) over the years, my frustration with Quicken grew in 2009 when, using a Windows version on my newly acquired Mac, slow didn't begin to describe the application's performance.

Of course, I thought, it's time to give up on this old, locally stored data paradigm and move to Mint.com. After fighting with Mint.com for about 10 hours over the course of two weeks, my accounts began to sync. Sort of.

First, I realized that I couldn't ask Mint.com to collect pre-registration transactions. Since I'm self-employed and use my financial tracking software to help with tax prep, it's helpful if it starts January 1. I opened my Mint.com account in March, 2010, and bit the bullet, entering in hundreds of transactions from prior months manually. Somewhere in this process, I realized that I couldn't actually associate these transactions with the proper account, but could "tag" them with keywords in an attempt to create accurate reports. I pressed on, creating a Byzantine system of tags I had to create a separate document elsewhere to track. I was determined.

But it didn't really get better. The hard won account syncing worked sporadically, at best. I began to notice large, missing date ranges in my accounts, and frequently Mint.com would create duplicate accounts, each with different date ranges, making the entire process inaccurate and anything but automated.

Mint.com Customer Service and I were becoming friendly, as the battle to get my accounts to sync was a long one. In their last response to me, they suggested I "hide" duplicate accounts and transactions. Really? This is not my music collection - I need this to be at least sort of accurate.

I understand that there is a trend in personal finance of keeping broad, general categories and not worrying about details. I'm all for this approach, but that doesn't mean I want a transaction for $500 worth of tires to show up four times, or that I don't mind if the software skips over two weeks of transactions every now and then, excluding significant payments, like my property taxes (paid in two lump sums each year). I mind this very much.

So back to Quicken I went, this time, Quicken for Mac. Intuit, it would be great if your marketing stuff told me something useful about the differences between the products. Since it doesn't, I went for the cheapest version.

Suddenly, it appeared to be 1996 on my screen, except worse. Download transactions directly? Nope. More manual, error prone labor for me. Is this the best we can do? Really? I consider dusting off the Dell machine running Vista that's under a big pile of paperwork on my floor. That's right. Quicken makes me long for WINDOWS.

I might just be old, but I don't care about having a "tag cloud" of my expense categories. Who came up with that? I want a nice, old fashioned, accurate data log. Really. That's it. Please?

Intuit, please release a product for the Mac that works. I know you can do it. I know you can.

Jen