My wife was something of an early adopter of home computers in general, and in financial software specifically. We’ve been using Quicken to handle our home finances for 25 years now, to the point that I cannot imagine not using it or something similar. I update all our transactions while I’m drinking my first cup of coffee in the morning (but after I’ve checked in at the Dope ), and it just makes everything run smoothly. I can project out account balances so that we haven’t had an overdraft in decades. I spot fraudulent credit card activity right away. At tax time, I can run a report or two and have all of our deductions, etc. in one place.
We’ve adopted, “Finance Fridays,” where on the first Friday of the month I run a detailed report of the previous month’s expenditures, and we review them and discuss. Again - one report and we’re ready to go. If things get tight, our reporting and discussions give us good starting points for where to trim.
I have not had detailed discussions with our friends or family, but I suspect that we are in the minority when it comes to this. For us, I can’t imagine doing anything else.
So, I’m mostly just curious - who else is as data-obsessed as we are when it comes to your personal finances.
I use the tools provided by the banks and the credit card companies and a couple of spreadsheets. No need for anything like Quicken for us.
It helps that I set up all of our recurring bills as Direct Debit or Credit Card payments. Most of our expenditures are via Credit Card (that is paid off entirely every month). It makes tracking easy.
We recently downsized houses and are saving about $900 a month. Good thing as I am still unemployed. Thankfully my wife’s job is secured and pays well.
I’ve tracked our finances for decades, made budgets, when we had cable, I use to call up every 6 months to renegotiate the deal. Hell, I just knocked about $3000 off our auto insurance bill. That felt very good. Shame I didn’t switch companies earlier.
We’re both excellent bargain shoppers. I can usually fix most things that need fixing.
Our only real extravagance is usually an annual vacation. Oh, and coffee. We have spent on an excellent coffee grinder, pot & good beans. My wife is a coffee addict and I like having my one cup a day be excellent.
I got Quicken when I bought my house in 2005. I had been using Quickbooks for my business since 2000 so it wasn’t a hard choice.
I “Look at my money” once a month. Enter/download all my transactions, pay all my bills and set up Quicken with all my expected bills and income for the next month. Not gonna lie, I look forward to it every month
My dad does all of his money management on paper, in an actual log book. No shame in that game. But he won’t be around forever and my mom needs to know how to do it herself. I tried to get her in to Quicken, just to watch the accounts, but she had no interest.
I used to do this, similar to you and your wife. Also with Quicken. I can’t remember exactly why I stopped. I think with the increased use of debit cards and credit cards, it became more of a chore to track everything. When I got my credit card statement, there was often 30 or 40 transactions that had to be entered as a “split” for the data to mean anything. I got behind and eventually stopped.
These days, I check my bank account activity online almost every day. I can look at my credit card activity online whenever I want to. My credit card companies are very good at alerting me when something strange happens. Basically, rough estimates of where we are seems “good enough”. (it doesn’t hurt that we’re not living close to the edge anymore, and I don’t have any need to know how much we spend on restaurants or electricity in any given month.)
There was a feeling of satisfaction knowing to the penny what was coming in and going out. I can see why you do it.
I have a check register app on my phone to substitute for the paper one. I enter my transactions in it, then compare them with the transactions shown in my bank’s app.
Quicken user since 1996 (v5). I still have the box/manuals and installation CD. Currently using Quicken 2015, the last version before it became subscription only. I fret the day it stops working. It’s getting more difficult to install on a new computer because of all the online stuff it tries to do.
I’ve tried various home-budget programs but I could never find one that really did everything I wanted it to, so one day I opened Excel and just built a spreadsheet according to my own specific needs. Spent a whole week building it (including a whole lot of impromptu Excel education) but eventually I figured it out, and now I’ve got an accurate record of every penny I’ve earned or spent in the last 11 years in there, and projections for savings and debt paydown extending 10 years into the future.
I think I know what you’re talking about. If I go to Target, some of what I spend might fall under groceries (milk or bread, say) while other stuff might be something for the household, like a toaster. Long ago, I stopped trying to itemize it precisely and just file all Target purchases under household and all supermarket purchases under grocery. And I’ve never tried to analyze my spending by category. At this point, the detailed record-keeping in Quicken is just a habit. (Although it can serve as a diary of sorts. If I want to know when I visited my friend John, I can look for something I know I purchased on the trip.)
I don’t use checks any more except for two regular personal service providers. But back in the day, I bought Quicken checks and printed them on my ink-jet printer. Signing, stamping, mailing. Gag. I used to hate doing checks. I’d have to sit down with a big bottle of wine just to get through it.
Now I pay all bills online, put everything (I do mean everything) on my Amazon Visa, and pay it off every month. I go through the Quicken download and categorize all the expenses, so getting stuff ready for my tax preparer takes a half-hour at the most. I avoid paper whenever possible.
Plus, I’ve accumulated enough Amazon rewards points that I can soon buy a car… almost.
I have friends who still do all their bills with handwritten checks that they mail. It is a mystery to me why anyone would do this-- I’m talking about computer-savvy people who are otherwise not tech-averse.
I started monitoring my finances using Microsoft Money then I think I went to Quicken when MS stopped upgrading Money. At some point Quicken stopped being available for personal finance in Australia so I tried some other things. I’ve since used Banktivity and MoneyWizz.
All of these programs have been fine for tracking my finances and providing some insight into future bank balances but none of them have been very good for budgeting. Enter YNAB.
I stumbled across YNAB (You Need A Budget) several years ago when I was looking around for alternative money management tools and gave it a go. Despite the fact that it didn’t have two features that were quite important to me, account balance forecasts and automatic transaction importing for banks outside North America, I loved the way it handled budgeting and I’ve stuck with it ever since. It allowed me to be in such a financial position that the loss of my job and my partner’s last year caused zero immediate financial stress.
At $84 US per year, it is not cheap and I have looked for alternatives that do a similar thing, including creating my own spreadsheet. Nothing else quite suits my purposes though. The main problem with creating a spreadsheet is that I don’t have a way to easily access my budget data from my phone and neither does my partner.
Once I understood how YNAB worked, I realised that a cash balance forecast wasn’t necessary. I have also since found third party apps that will import bank transactions into YNAB, though I had become a bit of a convert to manually entering all transactions in the mean time. It is still useful having bank transactions imported as they automatically link to my manually entered transactions and it fills in the blanks if I’ve forgotten to enter something.
We’ve used Quicken for years and years. We use it for our checkbook, since mistakes are a lot easier to find and fix, and my wife who is a writer uses it to track expenses she can deduct from her earnings.
When we did a two month road trip we put the rest of our bills to get paid either directly from our checking account or from our credit card, which gives cash back. And our investments are in one place, so we get a massive statement from them every month, and we can download the details for our taxes.
The only time we did a spending analysis was just before I retired, to see how much we needed to take out every month.
We’ve never done a budget in over 40 years since we are both cheap and don’t buy stuff we don’t need. Our financial advisor said “you guys don’t spend any money.”
So at this point the bank statement is golden, Quicken is close, and the checkbook register is only a loose approximation of reality.
Tripler-nomics has been MS Excel based since 2000. It’s been upgraded over the years, but it’s been flexible enough to adapt to everything I need. Lots of manual entry, but that lets me make sure I’m paying attention to every penny coming in, and going out.
I use You Need a Budget 4 (aka YNAB4). That version stopped selling in 2016, so if you don’t have it, too late!
I used to update it daily but I got too lazy. Now I just use it to track what’s in my retirement accounts. (I am “self-directed”, but it’s just buying broad ETFs.) My tax situation this year is weird, so I need to keep close track. I also have too many accounts to check each one daily (well, I could, but like I said, I’m lazy).
I manage my MIL’s trust assets on an Excel spreadsheet. For her benefit, not mine. It facilitates giving her the detailed to the penny monthly accounting she loves.
My money is “managed” by glancing at the paper statements from the banks, credit cards, brokerages, 401Ks, etc, when they come in, then filing same in the cabinet. If the numbers are getting bigger at about the right rate I’m happy. I know to 2 or 2-1/2 sigfigs how much there ought to be. Close enough. The rest is just noise.
Bill paying, to the degree it isn’t fully automated by my bank’s website in cahoots with my billers’ websites, is done by me on my bank’s website.
I did sign up with these guys Maxifi Planner a couple years ago for their Monte-Carlo based retirement simulator. It’s a decent tool if you don’t already have an M-C tool in your arsenal. They are hamstrung by one key design idea that I don’t share: namely that the goal is to have the same lifestyle working and in retirement. There’s not a good way to tell it that’s totally not my goal. Nonetheless, it’s a good way to add Monte Carlo to the usual overly deterministic spreadsheets folks whip up for themselves.
But once I’d used that to establish that my ROTs were valid under both plausible best & plausible worst case scenarios, I’ve not kept up my subscription with them.
I’m not trying to say I’m rolling in it and just don’t care. It’s more like I’ve always lived below my means, even when those means were quite modest, and as a result the expenses and the pennies take care of themselves subconsciously. Invest in the right stuff and leave it to simmer. Excess stirring wrecks the soup. I could regale you with expensive tales of such excess stirring in my earlier days.
We’ve done many different options. We tried Microsoft Money for a while when we first got married, but it proved to be cumbersome to do imports manually (this was 2001 or so) and keep up with all of the transactions over time. We also didn’t like the way it handled budgets for items like HOA dues that only came up quarterly or semiannually - it did something weird with the way it split it out monthly that didn’t really align with our conceptualization of the items. We didn’t want to put aside $10/mo for insurance and $5/mo for HOA dues, but rather just remember the insurance was due every April and it was $120 to account for that month, or the HOA dues are $60 every July and January.
We ended up just doing it on paper for a number of years. My wife still has the notebooks we kept the budget and records in for a long time.
Around 2011 or so, I gave Mint a try and that worked out OK, and really helped get a handle on things when my first child was born. It did present still the same challenges with budgeting of items that were not due every month, and it became more and more of an issue with getting transactions into the right buckets, especially if Mint tried to figure it out on its own. For years, it kept thinking my electric bill was a “bank fee”, warning me that not only was I over budget on “bank fees”, but informing me how much I could save with one of their partner banks instead!
Eventually, Mint started to have less and less success staying connected to my credit card accounts (Chase is especially terrible for this) and my mortgage, so it became basically useless. I stopped using it 4 or 5 years ago.
Since then we’ve been fortunate enough that our income exceeds our spending regularly, and we don’t keep a terrible close eye on the “budget”, although we do check the transactions regularly for correctness.
We met with a financial advisor and retirement planner a few years ago, and this was one of the things that bugged me about him; he wouldn’t get off of the, “tell me the lifestyle you want in retirement,” train. Our approach has always been, “what can we reasonably expect our retirement income to be, and we’ll adjust our lifestyle accordingly.” He just couldn’t seem to wrap his head around the idea that we wouldn’t be obsessively focused on making and accumulating as much money as humanly possible.
The part that really pissed me off was when he kept directing all of his questions to me. I told him multiple times, “she makes all the money and has the bigger financial brain. Talk to her,” and he just couldn’t seem to manage it.
We’ve got a very nice young woman from Fidelity on board now who seems to totally get our mindset, but that guy put me off financial planners for years.
), and it just makes everything run smoothly. I can project out account balances so that we haven’t had an overdraft in decades. I spot fraudulent credit card activity right away. At tax time, I can run a report or two and have all of our deductions, etc. in one place.