Thinking about using Quicken

Your intention is admirable, but at this stage of life, I'll wager there is only a very small chance that simply "seeing the accounts in a non-complicated way" will change her attitude. But you have to start somewhere...

Don't get sidetracked by such technicalities. Just get Quicken for your own machine, then carefully track at least six months if not a year of transactions (if you have historic transactions, you'll get there much more quickly). When the time comes, just print out whatever reports or charts are available, and sit down over coffee with a few printouts. You can't get much more "non-complicated" than that.

You both need to discuss together, the computer is just a tool, and one that she would already be using for finances if she were so inclined, so don't let it get in the way.

The key concepts you want to get across are:

1) cash flow - are you avoiding unnecessary finance charges, and also avoiding large chunks of cash in non-interest bearing accounts? 2) Income statement: is your annual income at least covering your annual expenses? 12 months is a good window because it includes non-monthly transactions like bonuses, interest income, insurance, property taxes, and so on. 3) Balance sheet: is your surplus annual income from (2) being invested in a diversified way, matching your goals for the next 5 year, 10 years, and beyond? Are your long-term liabilities under control?

It sounds like your bigger problem is coming up with and agreeing upon exactly what those 5-yr, 10-yr, and so on goals really are!

-Mark Bole

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I have used Quicken for many years. Be aware that in order for it to be useful for your purpose, you have to obsessively enter every little transaction and put it in the correct category. $3.60 for a latte? Book it. $0.75 for a can of Coke? Book it. After awhile it gets very tedious.

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It can be tedious if you do it this way. I actually use Money, but I don't bother to log cash transactions, except as cash. This helps on the tedium and gives you the info you need, although it opens the door to abuse by you or your wife: you can use cash tranactions to hide those $3000 lattes (but they are REALLY good!). Unless you pay for a lot of things in cash... I just assume all my cash goes to lunches and beer. My wife hasn't seen paper money in years, she'll use a credit card for a $3.00 transaction. Large withdrawals for a particular purpose I'll book under that purpose, for example if I withdraw cash while on vacation, I book it under the vacation category. But I don't book indipendent cash transactions at the $0.75 level.

-Will

william dot trice at ngc dot com

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I use something simpler - just a spreadsheet where columns are months and rows are categories. Before personal computers I did this with square-ruled paper. I sum rows and columes and somethimes graph them. I see a year at time. I can see the terribleeffect inflating is thaving in 2008 now.

Quicken/Money let you tie EVERY expenditure to a given category if you want the detail and effort.

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I finally got around to buying Quicken Deluxe 2008. It appears somewhat different than I imagined it. I thought one of the most basic things would be for me and my wife to be entering every penny that we spend every day into a categorized list of some sort. I can't find that sort of thing. I see where I can set up and categorize recurring expenses/payments and regular salary income on a calendar but I don't see what to do with the day to day expenses. Plus I can't figure out whether getting Quicken to talk with Citibank would cost me a monthly fee. It looks like $10/month. No way on that.

I'm reading Quicken for Dummies that I checked out of the libary and so far haven't even found the answers to these questions.

/Walter

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I have a much older version of Quicken, but on the starting screen there's a panel called "My Finances." Inside that panel you can set up accounts (like a checking account, etc.) and start recording transactions from those accounts. When you make a transaction from an account (and you can even add a cash account as mentioned earlier) you assign the transaction to a category. After some transactions have been entered, you can go to the "Reports & Graphs" panel to generate the kind of data you're looking for, rather than entering that data explicitly into a list or something. This should be more or less the same in the current version, though the details may differ.

Good luck,

-Will

william dot trice at ngc dot com

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