Is it safe to let Quicken remember my online banking information?

In this excerpt from
Answercast #89, I look at the security of having financial data stored in a
Quicken file on your computer.

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Using Quicken with online banking

Well, I need to understand what you mean by “exposed media”. For example, if anybody can walk up to your computer and run Quicken and access your financial information to do whatever they want to do then, “No.” I would not keep that information in Quicken.

On the other hand, if you’re a typical user and you’ve got reasonable security on your machine: so that you are avoiding malware; nobody that you don’t trust is going to walk up to your machine and start using it; perhaps you even have the information stored in an encrypted folder like I do – then absolutely.

Keep Quicken files secure

In fact, I do. I use Quicken and I do have Quicken keep the online information for my online banking accounts.

Like I said, I keep that information not only in a machine that I feel is relatively secure, but I keep the actual Quicken files in an encrypted TrueCrypt volume. That latter step is a nice “peace of mind.”

You might not necessarily need it if your machine is secure otherwise.

Remember too, that in general, Quicken will ask you for a single password for their password vault. In order to open that vault, you still need to provide that one password to let Quicken have access to everything that file has.

Is Quicken safe?

If you’re asking, “Is Quicken itself safe?” I believe it is.

Like I said, I certainly store my information there. The company, Intuit, has been around forever and I don’t believe that it would be anywhere close to their best interests to do anything but keep that information extremely secure – not only on your machine but in use as well.

So, the bottom line is as long as you feel that your machine is secure and your usage of your machine is secure then yes, I’m ok with keeping that information in Quicken. I do it myself.

(Transcript lightly edited for readability.)