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Strategies & Market Trends : The Residential Real Estate Crash Index -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Wyätt Gwyön who wrote (18174)	3/5/2004 12:09:34 PM
From: GraceZ	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 306849

what do you use to track your expenses? Quicken? Excel? Something very high tech....paper. I have a large double entry accounting package for my biz and it's a pleasure to go back to a columnar pad and calculator to run the house. I sometimes add the figures in my head just to ward off the loss of mental acuity that comes with age. It's easier and easier to track now since we tend to use one house credit card (which is paid off every month) and one joint checking account to pay for almost everything, so a large part of my expenses are printed right on the monthly statements. They even give us quarterly break downs but I don't use them. My husband throws a wrench into my system with cash, but I have him trained to save all receipts. I've been trying to move the old man into the information age for years. He uses the computer now to move money and pay some bills but if I insisted in using Quicken (I have Quicken 97 sitting here in shrink wrap) it would be all me. Years ago I set up a house account, a joint account that we both contribute equal amounts to on a weekly basis that all the joint expenses are paid out of as if the household was a separate person. I don't track as the year goes on unless we have a deficit. I was able to sit down and add them all up after you asked me the % difference, it took about an hour and a half. I encourage all the management clients I have to do something similar. Those who do wind up saving more money after a few years, so I have a strong motive to do this. Most don't know how much of their money is consumed on things that provide them little or no benefit while they do without the things they really want. I have put more than one friend on the envelope system after getting them to cut up the plastic. This is a system where they cash their pay check and then divide the cash into various envelopes for the different expenses. When the envelope is empty they stop spending in that category. People are completely neurotic about money and spending. It took years for me to make peace with it myself. I would say there are far more psychological problems with money in marriages than there are problems with sex and people are even more reluctant to ask for help. It still amazes me how much people compartmentalize money so that they can fool themselves into thinking things are not what they are. An entertaining book about this is: amazon.com No matter how smart you think you are about money I can guarantee you will see your own behavior reflected in some of the studies they cite.