Culture in the Blender

My boyfriend and I are organizing our finances and decided to use Quicken. I was attracted to the idea of having all my accounts and investments in all countries I have them in displayed in one place. Quicken can show investment accounts and even pull the current performance from the Internet… in theory. It insists that I must have accounts with an American brokerage firm, and keeps trying to get me to get the information automatically from H&R Block. I tried typing in ‘Handelsbanken’ as the broker, but of course it wasn’t listed and it won’t let me pick an option like “Other”, so now I’m stuck with H&R Block. Moving on. After some initial difficulty, I found the stock tickers for my mutual funds. (I don’t know what a ticker is in Swedish, which didn’t help since they’re listed on the Stockholm exchange.) After feeding them in, Quicken has no idea of what to do with them apparently because it can’t find them. Apparently nothing is listed outside the US. The drop-down list of types of mutual funds has a number of categorizations like small-cap and large-cap, and then one blanket called “International.” I imagine that the day I talk to a financial advisor here in the US, they will freak at my apparent lack of diversification. All my investments are “international.” Quicken doesn’t care that one is small-cap, one is large-cap, and two are emerging markets. One tracks the EuroStoxx 500! They’re all just “international”. Talk about a useless category. I know in the grand scheme of things, having your identity and investment strategy marginalized by a piece of software isn’t exactly the height of human suffering, but it shows how ingrained national perspectives are and how they are prescriptive. Surely, the makers of Quicken know about this thing called “economic globalization.” They just don’t seem to translate that to the people level of their users – and why would they? Who knows what’s going on out there, right? If you’re not 100% local you’re a problem case, and it’s your problem.