put all my finances in Quicken

I am able to track my spending and find out where the money is going. I also know my total debt and I found out that I actually pay off close to 900 dollars a month toward credit cards, student loans and car payment. It made the debt situation not look so bad because it’s getting smaller every month.

It will take a while to put everything down, but it will be worth it. Being a waitress, I really have no clue how much money I am making or where it’s going. I also want exact balances of my student/car loans, etc.

I KNOW how important it is to keep up with your personal finances. I will say that Quicken does this better than the others on the market. The PROBLEM I have is that now that I can see what exactly I’m spending my money on, it’s scary! :p

Very worth doing though…

... now to work on that dining out number…

http://automaticallyyours.com/blog/index.php/2005/04/04/quicken_2005_sucks

Now, onto January 2006. At this rate, I might catch up by Christmas! :)

The last monthly statement I reconciled in Quicken was October 2005. Since I no longer get the monthly statements in the mail, but check the balance regularly, it’s easy to procrastinate. I also have credit card statements piling up which adds to the clutter. My goal this weekend is to reconcile the November 2005 statement and print the December one.

I decided one day that since Quicken was free with my computer, I’d use it. I hooked up my accounts to it through the webconnect option and it’s awesome. It’s nice to see where my money’s going, and then make a budget based on it. It’s really helpful if you have more than one account too.

I’m now tracking all of my monthly expenses in a MS Excel spreadsheet. Ok, so it isn’t Quicken, but the real goal was to track my finances and expenses, not to learn or use Quicken, so this goal is complete.

I now have a very accurate picture every month of where my money is going and ideas for saving, as well as reasonable baselines for unavoidable expenses (e.g. energy, groceries, etc.) which is very helpful when making decisions about life changes – for example, now I’m in a much better position to compare cost of living levels if, for example, I took a new job in a different city.

I’ll use this information to help me reach my other goals, like saving to buy/build my own house one day. This was well-worth spending a little time getting organized with my receipts and building a simple Excel spreadsheet to track it all.

Good luck to everyone else who wants to do this!

its gonna be a long hall…but i need to set up a budget and get outa debt

I used to use Quicken to manage my finances and I loved it. It was the best way to pay my bills, download all my bank transactions, and learn financial information. Some time ago, my Quicken software became outdated, so I started using online banking to pay my bills. I still think that Quicken was much better. I guess I need to reinvest in the Quicken software.