Savings Account Withdrawal. Use what catagory?

For now, I made a "Cash Personal" account, and I made a transfer to that.

A problem I see now will be that this account will keep growing everytime I take some money out of the bank. In reality, this money is getting spent on various items, many of which I would be hard pressed to remember. What should I do with this?

Perhaps for a general budgetary idea, I should estimate how much goes where, i.e. some for groceries, some for entertainment, gas for the personal car, other auto expenses, etc. and put the rest in Misc?

I wouldn't generally be paying any regular bills with this cash, those usually get paid by check or credit card.

For now, I made a "Cash Personal" account, and I made a transfer to that.

A problem I see now will be that this account will keep growing everytime I take some money out of the bank. In reality, this money is getting spent on various items, many of which I would be hard pressed to remember. What should I do with this?

Perhaps for a general budgetary idea, I should estimate how much goes where, i.e. some for groceries, some for entertainment, gas for the personal car, other auto expenses, etc. and put the rest in Misc?

I wouldn't generally be paying any regular bills with this cash, those usually get paid by check or credit card.

You can create a new category ("cash"), or just use the "misc" category. You can also create a "cash" account. The Quicken help file has plenty of information on this topic.

You withdrew money from an account and spent it on something. That's an expense

- what else would it be?

Well, it's certainly an expense. Your choices are:

1. Leave the category blank. Quicken doesn't require a category, it just recommends one. A blank category would connotate that you can't remember what you spent the money on.

1. Create a category. I use Pers Allowance for stuff I don't want to worry about the details of.

PS. My Dad would be horrified at either of these suggestions. He not only categorizes every entry religiously, he maintains an account called "Cash On Hand". At the end of every day, he balances this account to the actual cash in his wallet, and posts entries for his spending during the day. I think this is micro-managing, but he's got a better history of his spending than I have.

A) I'm not your Father B) I only balance/reconcile my Cash account at month end. It's rare when my adjustment amount exceeds $5.

Dan

Tom - if you use a CATEGORY (I personally use "ATM" for cash I withdraw and leave it at that), then you will have a number of transactions that have ATM as a category in reports and such, and you'll not know where you spent the money. All the withdrawals simply are recorded in one account's register, no other accounts to muck around with. Advantage - simply to use, easy to see how much you're using day-to-day cash; big disadvatage (to some) is if you don't mark in the MEMO field what you used the money for, you'll not know where it went.

On the other hand, if you truly set up an ACCOUNT such as "CASH PERSONAL" like you said you did, then you'll be having an ever increasing positive balance in that account as a result of Quicken transferring moneys automatically from your savings when you enter the withdrawals. So you can either UPDATE BALANCE to the cash on hand every once in a while as others suggested, or else enter transactions to lower the balance as you remember how you spend your cash on a day to day basis. In this way, if you also are using categories on these transactions, you'll have ways of generating reports so you can see how you are spending you money (MEALS, NEWSPAPERS, CASH TOLLS, what-ever). Perhaps not record everything unless it's $5 or something like that.

Hi, Tom.

As the others have said, and as you apparently already recognize, withdrawing the cash is neither income nor expense, so using a Quicken Category is not appropriate to record the withdrawal. But spending the cash is an expense and should be Categorized.

Record the withdrawals as they happen. Use a Transfer to whichever other Account is appropriate. Transfer the cash to Checking Account, if that's where it went. Or to your new "Cash Personal" account, where it will stay until you record what happened to it after that.

You can categorize the expenditures in detail, or in batches, or in a lump sum - the choice is up to you. I'm one of those "micromanagers" like Fred's Dad (see later in this thread), but I only count my cash weekly, not daily. If you simply can't remember (or don't choose to record) what actually happened to some of it, then put it in a Category with a name like "Tom - Miscellaneous" or "Wasted!" or whatever makes sense to you. The important point is that your cash account balance be kept at or near the actual amount in your pocket, at least at the end of any reporting period you choose. And that all expenditures get accounted for, even if they went to "Can't Remember". If the cash is gone, it either went to some other Account (New TV or Investments or Checking - or Loan Payable) or to some Category (Groceries or Gas or Ice Cream Cones or Tom - Lost? or Other). The names of the Categories are not important - except to YOU. (And to your wife? Who else is going to read your Quicken?) Unless some of the expenditures are deductible on your tax return.

Another choice that many people make is to simply collapse the two transactions (withdrawal and expenditure) into one entry in Quicken. When they withdraw the cash, they put it directly into the "Tom - Personal Expenses" Category. This not only loses the details of "where did the money go", but also obscures the fact that there were actually two transactions for each amount withdrawn and spent.

RC

One thing I've noticed is that the "two transactions" problem doesn't exist quite as much here in Canada. One thing we have that the USA (and many other countries) does not, is the widespread adoption of "direct payment" services.

Many Canadians, especially younger Canadians, simply don't carry cash at all. You can purchase almost anything by using your banking card, which allows you to pay for purchases at the point of sale by an automatic funds transfer. The so-called "interac direct payment" is now accepted virtually everywhere.

The result in Quicken is that you don't need to record a cash withdrawal and a separate transaction for the purchase. You just record the purchase, since it shows up as a line item in your bank account register. It's easier to remember purchases this way, since the store name shows up in your bank account also.

While I never go out without a bit of cash, my experience is that virtually everywhere I buy here in the USA, I can use my bank debit card if I choose.

But sometimes not in my *Quicken* bank account; thanks to some combination of conflicting rules/practices between Quicken, OFX, the merchants, and the financial institutions. I do expect this to improve though.

Is it a bank debit card that's a Visa/Mastercard or some such, or a regular bank ATM card (which requires a PIN for any debit payments)? My experience traveling in the USA is that online debit cards (the kind where you need a PIN to use them) weren't as widely used, and that cheques were used much more often as payment.

Debit cards around here are used most often for smaller purchases (i.e. between

2 and 100 dollars). If it's under a couple of dollars, most people will pay cash, and if it's over a hundred, credit cards are typically used.

I've never had a problem here in Canada. When I download transactions, they show up in the right bank account, ready to be categorized. The transaction shows up in my online account pretty much instantly, but isn't downloadable into Quicken until the next business day (Thursday transactions show up on Friday, weekend transactions show up on Tuesday, etc.).

In my experience, a US bank "debit" card can be *treated* as either a debit or credit card for the purpose of making "cash" purchases: you can enter a pin, or sign a chit like it was a credit card (no pin entered) ... but both produce the exact same result; the money is taken directly from your checking account.

I suspect that I did not phrase my point correctly. What I meant was not that the transaction had any trouble finding the correct Quicken account; but that some downloaded debit card transactions do not contain the payee name. I was responding to your statement that the "*store name* shows up in your bank account also" [emphasis added]. I believe this is an artifact of the history of banking, where payee names were rarely available in bank transactions (statements): there is no similar problem with credit card accounts, where the merchants or their parent companies (payees), always had to be identified.

Tom,

If you're asking how to categorize cash money, I'll tell you what I do for general spending money. I do not micromanage our money (although my wife might think otherwise!).

I have an expense category called Cash that I budget for each month. When we get cash from an ATM or if something is returned and we get cash back, I put the cash transactions in the Cash expense category.

I just look to see if our cash transactions every month stay pretty close to what I have budgeted and don't worry about where it got spent.

If there is a substantial cash transaction (very rare), I appropriately categorize that in an expense category other than Cash. The only thing I can think of that I might use a large amount of cash for is if I'm trying to negotiate a purchase and think that cash might help swing the deal.

Of course, YMMV.