How to Use Quicken or Microsoft Money

Video Transcript

Hi! This is Alfred on behalf of Expert Village. In this video I would like to talk about using Quicken or Microsoft Money for helping you with your budget and keeping track of your expenses. In the Quicken and Microsoft Money, every time you make a deposit, write a check or pay a credit card bill or dispatch an electronic payment, you are asked to assign it to a particular category such as salary, clothing, groceries, childcare or health insurance. You also can also create sub-categories in dividing auto expenses for example into fuel, insurance and service. The program comes with a set of categories that handle most of the basics. You can edit the list and create the categories that make better sense for your particular household. The drawback of course is that entering and categorizing all your income and outflow is a tedious chore. You can reduce the tedium by judicially selecting categories. Let's say you are only worried about tracking your spending for recreation and leisure pursuits. You can create categories that cover those types of expenses and let everything accumulate under miscellaneous revenue or miscellaneous expenses. The problem with that approach is that you fore go the opportunity to spot problems in other spending areas that you might not even be aware of. A better solution is to track expenses using electronic banking that way you can download your payments and deposits directly from the bank rather than entering them by hand. Downloaded banking transactions generally show up with any categorization meaning you will have to add the categories by hand. But if you use a credit card that is issued by a bank permits electronic access, then the downloaded charges from your card sometimes do come with categories attached. They are not always right so check them. Either way once you've got your spending tracked by categories, drawing up a report requires only a few clicks of the mouse. Even better such programs often have a automatic budget creation feature that scans your spending in the past in order to estimate how much you'll spend going forward.

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