How setup Q for future expenses?

Open up a savings account at a bank and make regular deposits into it.

It then becomes an asset since it is something that you OWN. A liability is something that you OWE like a bill.

Actually, using a Liability account can be quite handy. You are setting up a "Liabiilty" to yourself which allows you to keep cash that is consigned for oter things mingled in your bank accounts until you are ready to spend it.

For major savings such as a car, etc., a separate bank account can be much easier to use though.

Sorta like a Savings Goal Account - which Quicken already has...

Yes, I've used this technique to set aside funds for annual life insurance or car insurance type payments. There's three ways to do this depending on what you are trying to accomplish. Since you are using this for a new car, it technically it wouldn't be an expense since you are really building up to eventually owning an asset (i.e., the "value" of the car you don't yet have), although it really depends on what you want to track.

BTW, the suggestion that has already been made of using a separate bank account can be much easier and less confusing, especially for a major purchase, but if you want your "saved up money" to remain mixed with your other funds and you track your net cash worth from month to month, this can work for you.

First of all, for all three methods, create a Liability account called "New Car Consignment". This is where you will put your monthly allocation towards your goals (i.e., the money that you are "consigning" towards your new car purchase). This account will be included in any cash oriented net worth reports you generate. This way, if you have $5000 in your bank account but your consignment account shows a Liability of $4000, your net worth reports will show you that only $1000 of what you have in the bank is yours for other purposes and isn't already allotted for something (sort of like recording all of your checks-the checking account balance at your bank isn't all yours since a large part is already consigned to checks that haven't cleared).

When you record a monthly increase in your liability, you need some way to disburse that transaction. There are three ways, depending on what you want to emphasize:

1) If you are just interested in maintaining the Liability so that you can track you Net Worth separate from the money you are saving, then just don't use a dispersment. Quicken, does let you "cheat" this way. Not my favorite, but then I'm a Geek :-) 2) If you like doing monthly and yearly type budgeting so that you don't get big bumps in your monthly expenses, even though technically these are cash assets you are accumulating, you can choose to treat it like an expense. This is useful also for annual and semi annual type bills (e.g., Life insurance, car insurance, etc.). For this, create an expense category called something like "Car payments (cons)". I like the "(cons)" suffix to remind me that this expense is actually paid from a consignment (liability) account. Now, on a monthly basis, or whenever you want to make a contribution to your "New Car Consignment" account, disperse it to the "Car payments (cons)" expense category.

When it comes time to pay for the car or bill or whatever, write the checks for the down payments, insurance, whatever you've planned on with your savings from their associated accounts and disperse it to the Liability account reducing it toward 0. If you had more or less than enough saved, just set up a final transaction to reduce or increase the liability to 0 and disperse it against the expense account. Note that this works great for annual budgeting of annual/semiannual bills since at the end of the year you have the ACTUAL amount that was paid from your consigned accounts recorded against the expense categories and you can then use those expense categories for budgeting the next year (i.e., by dividing the year's total expense on that category by 12, you can decide on how much you need to consign each month from that category again).

3) If you want to have all of your transactions reconciled (i.e., no undispersed transactions) but you don't want or need the details of the expense tracking identified in "2)" above, instead of setting up an expense category for dispersing your savings transactions to your "New Car Consignment" Liability account, set up an asset account called "New Car". Now, when you enter your monthly or scheduled allotment towards the car, enter the transaction to the "New Car Consignment" Liability and disperse it to your "New Car" asset account.

Now your "New Car" asset account shows the value of your **New Car**. I use the "**" just to emphasize that your New Car asset is secretly cash and not an actual car initially, but that is ok as long as you take it into account in your reports. I.e., as before, you will include the "New Car Consignment" liability in your cash net worth reports but you would NOT include the "New Car" asset since it has not actually been realized as a physical asset yet (i.e. the "New Car" asset isn't actually in your possession yet-it's just a convenient way to avoid recording the ultimate purchase as an expense instead of the acquisition of a savings).

Again, when you pay for the vehicle, you create a transaction against your checking or credit card account and disperse it to your New Car Consignment liability account reducing it toward 0. Once the vehicle is in your possession, the Liability should be set back to 0 and the "New Car" asset is now active and should be included in any appropriate gross net worth reports. This is sort of like paying a one time payment on a large credit card (liability) bill that has taken months to accumulate. Only in this case, you don't get to take possession of the goods you bought during that time until after you make the one time payment to pay off the "bill"

Anyway, I hope this helps some. As you can see, it is all in what you want to actually see in the numbers as to what technique you use. I have used technique #2 above for years so that my total monthly "expenses" are almost always the same even though I have large lump sum payments during the year. I can set up all the monthly allotments on the first of each month and that way at any given time I can run a cash net worth report and see if I'm still moving up or moving down. This has given me the ability to see problems coming many months away by just extrapolating any net worth trends on my reports.

Hmmm. Up until 3 months ago, I was using Quicken 98 because it was "reasonably" stable and I know where most of the bugs that would affect me were so I could stay away from them. Is this something new since then (I'm now using Quicken 2004 for mac)?

I tend to always be on the latest released version of most software.

Well I don't have Q98 to test. I know for sure it was in Quicken 2000 and I believe it was also in Q99. I have no idea about Mac - I have no Mac either. Of course you could simply search the help for savings goal...

OK I guess the new car was a bad example

Lets say it will be a pure expense of some kind...such as saving up for a vacation OK?

Use savings goals.

Did a quick check, nothing of the sort there about any special accounts.

Macs are inferior beings to inTuit. What do you expect from a company that's owned by MS now.

- Jeff

OK then just throw away example "3)" since you will have no assets when it's over. Again, it kinda depends on how you want to view your money movement. Do you want to just have it accounted for and "set aside" until you're ready to spend it (item #1), or do you ALSO want to track it as an averaged out type of expense as well (item #2).

Also apparently in the PC version of Quicken there may be a special account type set up for this (a Savings Goal Account?). I'm not familiar with that since it doesn't seem to be available on Mac versions of the package.

Did you search for "savings goals" or did you search for "special accounts"?

And 95% of all computer users...

AFAIK Intuit is not owned by MS. When did MS buy Intuit?

Actually, since you mentioned it, I did both. I also did a "Create new account" and checked out all the selections there. Nothing

Not quite sure whether that was meant to be "95% of all computer users are inferior beings to Intuit" or it was meant as "Macs are inferior beings to 95% of all computer users"

If it was the former, then your number is low. As long as Intuit has a corner on this end of the market and can charge $20 a minute to answer questions on their products, they are going to think that they know it all, obviously.

If it was the latter, well, the 15 years I've had to use PCs at work have been hell a lot of the time. The 20 years I've owned Macs, in general have been wonderful. Just my personal experience.

Not to mention the 97 thousand-some odd viruses, worms, trojans and other nonsense that I've never needed to worry about at home. At work, they pay an IT department to take care of that and I just make lots and lots of backups of work on my own using company media.

I don't mind being considered inferior when I know what the real benefits to my own personal world are :-)

All Computers are trouble, but there's something immoral about living off of someone's grief, ya know? Intuit really needs to get their act together an focus more on quality and stability rather than just fancy UI changes every year.

About 3 or 4 years ago, wasn't it? I'm pretty sure Intuit announced that they were under new mismanagement or rather it was in the process of happening. Lots of Hooraah in the media at the time. Funny though, now that you mention it, I don't really remember a lot of discussion about it since. I wonder if it eventually didn't go through or something. That may be...

I need to go check up on my computer history. I'm getting old enough to start getting senile so I better keep up with these things :-)

Actually I meant that Macs have a tiny percentage of the overall computer market.

I don't really engage in ascribing intent nor classism in such a fashion. I also don't pay $20/min for support. In fact I don't even use Intuit support. At one time I provided it however...

I can get along on many types of machines/OSes. Each has their purpose. They are all just tools anyway.

As I've often said, I've been on the net 24/7 since at least '98, no AV software at all, just use XP's firewall to keep down the noise and have never had a virus. (BTW: I always love how you Mac users exaggerate! 97 thousand? Come on!)

Perhaps your IT department just handles viruses and backups. As for me, most of my career has been in various IT departments and I can assure you we do a hell of a lot more than that! You know not what you speak of.

Inferior is your choice of words. All I as saying was that Macs are not that popular. I understand them somewhat and respect them. It's my understanding, for example, that a Unix based core resides under the shiny hood. I prefer Unix based systems. In fact I work at a company that produces Linux based embedded OSes. And I build them and the compilers and tools that goes with them. That's my job. However, cruising on a Mac the few times I had looked and looked but could not find the damn command line!

This directly contradicts your earlier statement about 20 years of bliss with your Mac.

Computers sometimes are trouble but mostly they are not. We all use them to solve problems don't we? Ergo you got a problem you have trouble. If you cannot figure out a way to solve that problem then you will experience just trouble. If you can figure out a way to solve the problem then you experience bliss as you say, until you look for the next problem to solve with your computer and you're back into Troublesville so to speak.

I wouldn't know. I'm not doing that.

You're new hear aren't you? I was here back in ~98 and we said that then. Here we are in 2005 and it's still the same. By and large you can say that about any software out there at all. The real fact is quality, stability, consistency and bug reduction doesn't sell products (they can lose customers but they don't gain customers) - fancy GUI changes are sexy and sell. That said Intuit has also added lots of functionality and has fixed many things over the past 7 years.

No, it wasn't. You should check your facts before blurting out such things as if it were fact.

That is exactly what happened. So then if you are not sure and do not wish to bother researching the topic to speak about it with authority please don't put forth your assumptions as if they were facts. Instead indicate that this or that is what you heard.

In the future do this before you make a fool of yourself.

I'm using Q99..... and don't see such feature

Is my version of Quicken too old for savings goals?

intuit.com. Methinks you didn't try very hard at all.

• OK, so that was just a jab for fun (Running and ducking...)

Strange

When I type "savings goals" into the help file of my Quicken 99 Basic... it says this feature is available in Q99 Deluxe and Home and Business only

see the attached pic

Strange

When I type "savings goals" into the help file of my Quicken 99 Basic... it says this feature is available in Q99 Deluxe and Home and Business only

I appreciate that. Many times I've received the other, hence my initial impression.

You exactly correct (sheepishly), I had seen that number recently and had no buisness using it. The actual number is down around the 27000 mark and that includes just about everything since the DOS days. The Macs never really exceeded around 50 and most of those were eliminated prior to OS 9. The ratios of mac to Windows that you mentioned above likely contributes a lot to those numbers too. I've often wondered what the numbers would have been like if the markets were more closely matched. The infrastructure of the original macs were a little more impervious but in my experience, Apple programmers seem to make just as many mistakes as others...

Actually, I've never seen an IT department that wasn't being worked to death and I didn't mean to imply what you said. Only that it's a lot easier to use a tool when someone else is worrying about most of the details. When you own your own, it's all your baby. I just didn't want something at home that would take as much attention as my machines at work usually seemed to need.

Not a contradiction. The statement was intended to be relative. Trust me, the trouble that I had on my home system was bliss compared with what I had to endure at work over those years :-)

Yes, I'm new (again, like in '98). Since I now have to use Q2004 since Q98 doesn't work on my recent OS I now have new questions/issues. I'm appreciative of the things that have been fixed, unfortunately things which used to work for me now appear broken so I need to determine what my workarounds are.

And while I'm here, I hope that I can contribute a little in a positive way but I've already discovered elsewhere in this very thread that since the Mac version is missing some things that the Windows version has, my suggestions may not be as useful as those from others.

I plead for tolerance here. It appeared obvious from the information in the comuter 'zines and on the news that it was a done deal. I just missed that part where it fell apart. That part usually doesn't get as much press :-)

I usually try not to do this. As they say, "Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt"

Unfortunately, I'm also now guilty of dragging this thread way off topic, so better shut 'er down here.

I do appreciate the courteous corrections that I receive online has it helps me to learn.

Now look who's talking! :-)

Not everyone who owns Macs have rich uncles. In my situation, I've discovered that if I'm going to have a nice computer of ANY type, I had BETTER learn how to save!

And I did it using Q98 on a Mac that DIDN'T have savings goals accounts. I had to fudge it using plain old Liability accounts.

(Although I'm really curious about how much easier it might have been if I had the special accounts--gonna check up on your references).

Again, if it's a Mac user, why would they think a Q99 feature that everyone was talking about might be missing from his application. After all it IS Q99, right? Why go look on a web site when you have the searchable help manuals installed with your application?

You had better. These new iMacs are flat and fly like a Frisbie. You can get a lot more distance out of them.

And they're heavy...