Feeling Credit Card Purchases

snipped-for-privacy@cfl.rr.com wrote in news:1132489333.527420.299320 @g49g2000cwa.googlegroups.com:

Sign up for automatic deduction of the due balance on the due date from your checking account. Make a recurrent transaction that reflects this (a transfer payment from checking to CC) on the due date, which gets entered into the register(s) 31 days or more ahead of time. Then the balance in the checking account on the due date of the CC will reflect the payment of the outstanding balance. Update the amount when you get a statement. Discover has a good system for this. The download will give you a bunch of "transactions" that show the amounts and due date around the statement date. Doing things this way relieves you from the worry whether or not you did pay (you have given the CC company the job of ensuring this). You just keep enough money in cheking to cover the charges (I know that this may sound easier than it is, but in the long run it is advantageous to you to not carry a credit card balance - if necessary get a personal loan to start it, and be FRUGAL!!).

Create a savings goal account. Enter in the transactions into the regular cc account. At the end of your entry, tally the newly entered transactions and contribute that amount to the savings goal from the checking account.

When the cc bill comes, return the money to the checking account and reconcile the cc account as normal.

Eyeball your credit card account balance and your checking account balance. If the CC account balance is smaller than the checking account balance, you're in "green" territory, otherwise in "red". Anything more than this is not feasible with quicken, esp. for a lousy few points.

If you -really- want to feel like a purchase is immediately hitting your checking account, but you want the 1% credit-card rebate (are those the "points" to which you're referring?), just get a debit card and use it in credit-card (with rebate) mode. And the next day when you download transactions from your bank: voila! There the transaction'll be in your checking account. For real.

Garry

Look at the account graph in the Calendar view, making sure to include both the relevant credit card and checking accounts in the set. You'll see your "net worth" (taking only the selected accounts into consideration) indicated as connected dots overlaid upon the segmented bars of the contributing account balances. The dots indicate the sum of the assets (cash) and liabilities (bills) in the contributing accounts. When the connected dots are above the zero line (X axis), you have sufficient funds to cover your pending bills.

I use this account graph to plan purchases and experiment with cash flow opportunities. With enough scheduled transactions entered (paychecks, predictable expenses) and knowledge of your credit card's billing cycle, you can usually get yourself an extra three or four weeks of free loan time from your credit card accounts.

snipped-for-privacy@cfl.rr.com wrote in news:1132489333.527420.299320 @g49g2000cwa.googlegroups.com:

It sounds like what you want is to escrow the amount of the charge from your checking account. The problem is I can't think of a way to automate this. What I think you want is a new asset or banking account called something like "escrowed credit card funds". When you record a normal CC transaction, you would create a transfer from your checking account to the escrow acct of the same amount. When it is time to pay the CC bill, transfer the amount you are paying from the escrow account. If you do this, your checking account balance is actually the sum of the actual checking account and the escrow acct.

Give some thought to this proposal and see if maybe there is some way to make it work for you. If QW had the concept of sub-accounts I think it would facilitate this sort of accounting problem.

scott s. .