organize my finances

to get our finances organized.

I had gotten tired of entering financial information into Quicken, but this year when we did our taxes it was quite painful. Trying to figure out things like just how much we spent at the doctor and dentist, and then looking for the tax basis of an investment we had sold were very time-consuming. So, with reluctance, I guess I will at least enter our checkbook transactions in Quicken.

Also need to get our investment information up to date, but that is nearly done.

I have a couple specific items which I want to accomplish in order to call this goal complete:

1. Do some essential filing that I have gotten behind on.

2. Make a list of all bank accounts and passwords, etc, that both my husband and I have. (Getting re-married and having a lot of “baggage” makes this goal more challenging!)

3. Update our finances on Quicken. I used to be a hard-core Quicken user, and I loved knowing the percentage return on my investments, etc. However, about nine months ago the computer that I had Quicken installed on died, and I only just recently got a new computer to use at home. (When my son built his new gaming computer, I “inherited” his one-year old dell computer.)
I’m not so concerned about inputting my checkbook into Quicken anymore. What we are concerned about is the “big picture”, with an eye towards retirement. I want to get a handle on how much money I can expect to have when I am 55 years old. Also, we are planning to try to sell our current home in about three years, with no real clue yet where we want to move. So We want to know how much money we might have available for buying a new home, hopefully for cash so we don’t have to worry about a mortgage any more.