I'm trying to set up individual "pots of money" within Quicken and I just can't find a good way to do it. I've used Quicken for 8 years and have been very pleased ... until I decided to set up a budget and become debt-free.
First of all, I have my checking account and 2 ING direct accounts. I have a scheduled transaction that deposits my paycheck every other week. Occasionally, I have to modify this transaction to account for varying tax and insurance amounts. I have a scheduled transaction that pulls $250 once a month from the checking account into the ING "A" account. I have a scheduled transaction that pulls $50 every two weeks into the ING "A" account. I have a scheduled transaction that pulls $100 every two weeks into the ING "B" account. I also have a scheduled transaction that divides about $400 per paycheck into 12 different "Assets". I have another scheduled transaction that withdraws $300 into 8 existing categories.
Basically, I am creating a budget but I want to see how much money exists in budgeted "asset" in the right column. The downside to this approach is that each time I reconcile, the transfers between checking the the "assets" continue to multiply in number (since they are not cleared within the reconcile process).
Is there a way to flag transactions to/from an Asset to not show up in reconcile?
I tried to use Saving Goals to accomplish this, but there are some major problems with this:
- Contributions to Saving Goals cannot be used within a Split.
- Savings Goals cannot go into the negative.
Is there an easier way? The "Budget" feature in Quicken doesn't seem to be the right solution in that it:
- Does not display the outgoing category balances in the right column. In order to view the status of a budgeted item, I must load the Budget report and then generate a report to see the data. What a pain in the ...
- Does not allow me to specify which date to start the "every two weeks" money allocation for the budgeted items.
- My paycheck varies from week to week; so some budgeted items may get more/less money each week. The Budget feature is so automated in Quicken that it does not allow for these random occurrences.
Any tips or suggestions will be appreciated. Thanks!