2006 Goals

One of my biggest goals for 2006 is to take care of finances. I’m usually a big saver, but in 2005, Craig and I bought things that we could probably have done without. We used to save a bunch, but when we started making more money, we started spending more money. So, to start the year out right, I bought Quicken 2006. It’s great!

Several years ago, I used Quicken, but it was basically an electronic register that logged purchases. It wasn’t any different than entering debits into my check register. It still required that I keep track of all receipts, etc. With Quicken 2006, though, the software downloads your banking statements from your financial instituion (including credit cards, IRAs ,etc) and imports them into Quicken for you.

So, every morning at 2AM, quicken downloads our information and each morning, I spend about 10 mins updating our accounts. Newly downloaded info is kept in a preliminary ledger and I have to “accept” the transactions before they’re imported into my quicken ledger.

Quicken has renaming rules it follows, too. When Craig eats at Subway, whether it’s the one on 2nd street in downtown or the one just around the corner from our place, any entry containing the word “subway” will enter “Subway” as the payee and “dining:fast food” as the category. I set the rule up once, and it follows it for every entry.

Craig and I recently sat down and adjusted our budget and then I entered that info into Quicken. At any point now, I can click on reports and see our budget vs. actual spending for every line item. I can see reports for “month to date” or “year to date.” So, if we’re over budget this month on entertainment, I can click the yearly report and see where we stand for the year. We might be up this month, but if we were down last month and it’s balancing out, I’m OK with that.

I’m trying not to be too anal about our spending, but knowing that within a year or so we’ll be applying for a mortgage, I definitely want to make sure we do all we can between now and then to best prepare ourselves financially.

I also got online and viewed my free credit report. The government guarantees every individual access to one free credit report (from each of the three credit reporting bureaus) per year. If you don’t know whats on your credit report, you should definitely take advantage of the free annual report. You can learn more about your free credit report by visiting the FTC Website. BEWARE! There are many companies out there that offer “free credit reports” (but actually charge a fee or are a scam to get you to enter personal information) so be careful. The FTC website has the link to the Government guaranteed free report.

With Quicken, we monitor our spending more closely and are saving more.

That way, I’m more likely to get the house I want…..right Craig?

March 19th, 2006 Posted by Jessica | Life | one comment