Monday, May 4, 2009

Quicken

I created an account with http://www.quicken.com/ this weekend, and so far I am really liking it. I wanted to use http://www.mint.com/ but wasn't ever able to get my bank accounts to download, so I gave up. There are a few kinks I need to work out, but I'm learning and it's been fun playing around with it. I really like that it allows me to budget by setting up limits and then alerts my phone when I'm close to my budget on things like gas, or groceries. I also like that I can sort transactions by type, rather then just by date like when I was using my checkbook register. The only problems that I have, and really they aren't problems, just quirks of mine, are that I like to budget by the week, but Quicken tracks monthly. For now I'm still budgeting weekly in my notebook, and monthly on Quicken, and that seems to work out well. Over time I think I might like it better since I'll be able to see both where I am this minute, and where I stand for the entire month. My other problem is that our bank releases David's check the day before payday, so for us it's the 14th and 31st of every month instead of the 1st and 15th. Our bugeting month starts a day early, while Quicken uses a calendar month. I think we'll try just pretending like the money doesn't deposit until the next day and see how that works. I'll update in a week or two and let you know how I feel about it once I've been using it for a while.

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