Many moons ago when we were poor college students who had lost track of our finances he asked me for a moratorium on spending. I agreed. Until I saw this octopus cookie jar at Target. It was $12. Obviously I had to buy it. It was an octopus.
Well, he wasn’t too happy. We got into a stupid fight. Years later he teases me by saying that purchasing it was my greatest regret, and then I double down on it being the best purchase I ever made.
The problem now, of course, is that in the last fifteen years I have never found a use for it (I don’t even bake cookies), but my pride dictates I must keep it. Admittedly, it’s pretty cute. Just utterly useless. It’s currently in our guest bath. If anyone has any ideas for how I can use it, thus proving my husband wrong, I’m all ears.
For a very long time I used spreadsheets for my finances, but when I started my own business in 1997, my accountant recommended QuickBooks for the business finances, which I used until I retired and closed the business is 2021.
While I was still running my business, using Quicken for my personal finances made sense. But once Intuit moved from a purchase model to subscription software, I looked for a replacement and found AceMoney.
It’s not quite as sophisticated and full-featured as Quicken, but that means it’s much simpler as well, and I never needed most of Quicken’s more advanced features. The best thing is that you pay $45 once, and that’s it. They do free updates once in a while, but they’re not changing the UI every fifteen minutes and making you re-learn everything you need to do.
The only problem I’ve had lately is that Bank of America, where we have our checking account, has decided to stop providing downloads in QFX format, which AceMoney can import. So I’ve had to download my monthly transactions as CSV and create a macro in Excel to reorder the data in AceMoney’s format.
@commasense Quicken is a great tool. Or so I understand from those I know who use(d) it. I never did. For taxes we use Turbo Tax and we love it. Good tools.
Speaking of good tools I’m now 21 days into the month, I’m still over spending but my spending rate has lessened. I’m now 8% over where I should be. IIRC earlier I was 22% over.
The spreadsheet is working really well. Very easy to use. At this point I don’t think I’ll need or want to add a column for Category.
I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned this before in my threads and posts about retirement / budget / spending / cash is king, etc, but it is my goal (I’m 64) that I die with more money than I began retirement with. I want my principal investments to continue growing. I’m just trying to live off of the interest earnings. That’s the plan, anyway. I hope this expense tracker gets me there.
Or maybe I’ll blow it largely away when I’m 75 and buy a yacht that I never wanted. Or something.
@commasense Did you import your quicken data into Acemoney? I just tried exporting all my quicken data (1994-2026) into a QIF file for import. The resulting QIF file is 1.5KB. The source QDF file is 26MB. Seems like an exraordinary amount of compression.
I don’t keep track, but I once went through my bank statements to see how much I roughly spent on each category (rent, utilities, grocery stores, amazon, medical care, etc) just to get a rough idea of how much I spend each month. But I always earn more than I spend so its not an issue.
The problem is for some of us, getting a credit card is not easy. I have good credit of close to 800, but I’ve always paid for everything out of pocket and never taken out debt (I wrote checks for cars I’ve owned, I’ve always rented and never had a mortgage, paid for everything with a debit card). I paid off my student loan debt 20 years ago, so I don’t have a track record for debt. I was lucky to finally get approved for a credit card, but its limit is only $1300. I spent very little on it (supposedly only using a small % of your potential credit builds your credit better than putting a larger amount on it out each month) and autopay each month.
I even applied to secured credit cards. I offered to write a check for $5000 to secure a $5000 line of credit, and they wouldn’t even approve me for that. Its 0 risk to them, and they wouldn’t even give me that.
My understanding, at least for the UK, is that what lenders of all kinds want to see is a history of borrowing and paying off the debt.
When our daughter wanted her first car, I could have paid cash (it was fairly cheap), but she applied for a personal loan from her bank, and I gave her the money to pay it off every month. This demonstrated that she was a reliable borrower, and she has not encountered any issues since.
That doesn’t seem right, does it? I was able to import my Quicken data to AceMoney, but I’m afraid it was so long ago, I don’t remember anything about the process.
Also, if you’re using the web-based version of Quicken, converting from that may be a whole different animal, since I think I switched from the PC version I purchased, before I was forced into the subscription version. So even if I could remember, I might not be able to help. Sorry about that.
I understand that, but credit is done with the goal of making money for creditors. If they don’t feel they can make money off of you, they won’t loan you money. The loan for your daughters car cost more than the car would’ve cost in cash. My point is that its a shitty system where you have to pay unnecessary interest to prove you are worthy of paying unnecessary interest.
I was hoping getting a credit card and only running up 10-20% of the balance each month, and paying it off in full would help me get a credit card with a larger line of credit so I didn’t have to use my debit card tied to my bank account, but it didn’t. I still don’t know why I got denied for a secured credit card. That should be zero risk for the bank.
Having said that, I’ve used a debit card tied to my banking account for 30 years, and the handful of times there was fraud the bank always caught it and alerted me.
The debit card risk is not so much from fraud but from a purchase going wrong: If I book a holiday and pay at least part of the cost by CC, I am protected for the full amount if the supplier goes bust. If I order goods and they fail to arrive, I can claim from the CC company. This does not work with debit cards.
@bob_2 is correct. That’s been my experience. If you want to boost your credit rating, get a loan and make payments religiously. Then when that’s done you can get a bigger loan and then pay off that one.
IANAE but I do not think paying the loan off early helps you get a better credit rating boost. A guess.
Probably not. The theory behind it must surely be to establish yourself as someone who can manage their finances properly.
In ye olden days (before computerisation), your bank manager would look at your history to decide whether you were a good risk, and a “good risk” is defined as one that is likely to be profitable for the bank. These days, of course, there will be an algorithm, and no human will be involved.
Now, on day 27 of the month, I’m at 6% over where I should be. With 5 days left in the month (including today) I might be able to meet my monthly limit.
We use Discover for most things bought out of the house, and the regular payments go to our checking account. We use Quicken to keep track of it. We only use other credit cards when Discover is not accepted.
My wife enters the payments in Quicken and I check it against the bank statement once a month. We’ve never had a budget in 47 years of marriage because we are both naturally frugal.
At the moment, and for the rest of our lives I suspect, our income is more than enough to cover anything we want to spend, so we see no need to a budget.
We had an ancient version of Quicken which no longer worked when my wife got a new computer. We had to buy a new one, and go through a two step process of converting the old data to a new format. But their documentation was good, and it worked fine.
I used the free Empower tracking site for a couple years; it works fine for total monthly spend as well as drill-downs to categories and transactions. I got tired of its inability to reliably remember vendor categories and occasionally wonky credit card connections
I did Quicken for one year until my subscription ran out. Its reporting features are from the 1980s and seldom fit their window.
I am three months into using Monarch. Me like. First year cost about $67, which I believe was a 45% discount. Checks all my boxes; reliable; flexible; and looks great. No ads.
purchased/built a very nice house w/out having to resort to a mortgage or any other form of credit…
… then got a CC with a hard limit of $1,500 for a year or two …(I think I am up to $3k or so now … not that I care b/c I pay it off every month in order to not get hit by sucker-fees
We do the same thing, but with Visa. But we find the spreadsheet helpful. Yes, it’s an extra step.
We used to use Mint in a similar manner, and we liked it until they changed it. Well my wife really liked it. I did not find it easy enough, and the spreadsheet is easy for both of us.
