I'm obsessed with simplifying. After all, every minute saved doing something productive means another minute I can spend doing something unproductive. For the bills, I have everything set up and goes out automatically. I used to maintain a spreadsheet that itemized our cash flow and separated everything into categories so we could easily see where our money went. It took way too much time to maintain, so currently we have a 'rough idea' of where our money goes.
I already use QuickBooks for our businesses, but the banks we use for our personal finances does not support QB and quite frankly, it's much too complicated for our personal finances. I looked into Quicken, but I don't want to have two different gigantic financial software competing for space on my hard drive.
Any suggestions on how to automatic my budget tracking without too much complication, expense or time required?
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Hope’s Debt Update – April, 2024
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Lessons I learned the last two months as I’ve started receiving income
again: Paying everything at the beginning of the month can leave you
struggling at...
15 hours ago
4 comments:
Don't forget that September 28th marks the start of woodworking season. And, it just happens to be someone's aniversary too.
We're more of the "rough idea" camp. I log into our bank account a couple times a week to make sure we're not going to go negative and other than that, we don't keep much track of it.
I used to be super-diligent about balancing the check book and everything, but now that we hardly write checks for anything, I haven't balanced the check book in years.
I keep thinking I'd like to use QuickBooks or Quicken for our personal finanaces, but I'm not sure what that would get us, other than one more thing to try to keep track of. ???
I've totally missed the mark here on a timely comment, but have you checked out mint.com? I've been using it for about a year or so, it's free and it gives you a great idea as to whether you are staying on budget or not. It's very secure...
I'm a type A personality, so I absolutely CRINGE when I hear of others not keeping an eye on their bank accounts. I'm reading a book right now called "Stealing Your Life" by Frank Abagnale. It is SCAREY. It states that those who don't keep a closer eye on their bank accounts and credit cards are prime candidates of identity theft. There are people who have gone for 10 years or more and never knew that someone had assumed their identity and had been using credit cards in their name, taking out loans, etc. I have been using Quicken for both my home and small business finances for over 10 years. It is EASY! Much, much easier than the monster Quickbooks. I highly recommend it.
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