I am awesomely financially organized

[cjsmith]

I'm entering more Quicken data. I've caught up through the end of 2004 for a couple of credit cards and through the most recent statement on checking and savings.

Tidbits that likely amuse only me:

I use three credit cards on a regular basis and I also carry three cards, but they're not the same three. One card is used mainly online; one in my wallet has never in its history had any activity whatsoever. The odd part is that this is not deliberate.

PayPal eChecks are very hard to categorize. I paid ten bucks a year ago for WHAT exactly? I'm sure this will get easier as I enter data on an ongoing basis instead of throwing in fifteen months at a time.

It is hard to conceive of a more broken user interface for entering dates than the Quicken 2005 method. If the blinking text cursor is sitting on the month, and you type a number, that number becomes the day... SOMETIMES. (When adding a new entry right after reconcile this behavior is common.) If you click where you want to type (say, after the last 'day' digit in a MM/DD/YYYY formatted field), it will first highlight the month, then pop up a calendar, then highlight the month and the day, then pop up a calendar, GOTO 10... but only when entering a date for finance charges in the Reconcile dialog. In other date fields elsewhere, two or three or five clicks will eventually let you type into the day portion of the string. Nowhere will one click do it. It is also not possible to get there using the TAB key.

Quicken thinks I have -$636.05 in my wallet right now. Cool! Sadly, when I looked, I couldn't find any of the negative dollars. I wanted to see what they looked like.

Comments

[ashiegrrrl.livejournal.com]

For the most part, I really like Quicken. I'm in the middle of organizing my finances as well. =\

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

Getting started and getting everything set up is a big job, isn't it? Yikes. But I'm well on my way. Next step: 2005 for those credit cards.

For some reason it's easier for me to do a big job than to keep up with an ongoing task. I hope once I get all the data I had into Quicken, I don't just abandon it.

[lkeele.livejournal.com]

You can't see negative dollars. They're invisible.

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

I cleaned up a couple of transactions (withdrawal means the money went into "cash", who'd a thunk it) and then it thought I had over two thousand positive dollars in my wallet. I couldn't see those either. But one withdrawal was actually for an IRA so I set up a Quicken account for that. I'm back to invisible negative dollars. :-)

It's kind of fun to see all these numbers prance about the screen. Things aren't yet cleaned up enough that these numbers represent reality, so I can laugh when it thinks I have $2K in my wallet instead of crying over where it went.

[jupiter29.livejournal.com]

Those negative dollars are pretty cool and they're collectors items. Interestingly, they look exactly like regular dollars, except that there's a small negative sign in front of the numbers on the corner. If you are really interested, I would be happy to send you a -$5 bill for... say... $7.50? Think about it. ;)

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

Thanks, but I apparently have 127 of them already! Now if only I could find them...

[jupiter29.livejournal.com]

Well, losing 127 dollars would be bad. So wouldn't losing 127 negative dollars be good? :)