Luke's Family Website

P.S. I gotta throw out one more glitch (I think it was the one bugging me to make me go in and poke around...I really need to move on to my normal life this morning...but it really bugs me). The paycheck thing is so nice that it lets you specify the employer match...and then puts it into your picture as an uncategorized...maybe even a "blank" category income item! I hope there's something else wrong (related to the category import or something). That's really sad that that kind of thing would be this way. Anyway. I know my entries today have been skewed negative on Quicken, but I'm just realistic. I'm still very comfortable that this is the very best thing that's happened to my needs in this area in at least a decade (I'll let the stabilizing of the GUI interface spreadsheet have a place in history)...so Quicken 2008 rocks! ...but that won't stop me for looking for it to improve.

P.S.S. Most interesting feature enhancement: a log of all the overt actions taking on the My Savings Page...when did I change that rollover or amount?

My wife does a great job keeping our physical house clean, and I enjoy keeping our financial house clean. So I'm up for the large amount of effort it is taking to move to the new way of taking care of our finances in Quicken 2008. Part of the large expenditure of time is also trying to catch up from my first bout of procrastination on it in a long time, but I am enjoying the process.

I don't know how people (for example my brother) take the time to document something after they figure it out. That seems to be partially an illustration of having a fair amount of time on ones hands. In my case it's going to have to just run on the fumes of how much I love to do this kind of thing.After the previous blog entry I created the basic links page and stubbed out the book page. Falling asleep that night I thought of another chapter that I hope will come back to me. I've dropped Quicken a web site comment to ask about any guidelines they have for extensive posting on the software. Last night I was able to move months: from October to November. One feature I need to remember to ask them about is more flexibility to set what "month" the software is operating under despite the date. There are actually a lot of little quirks in Quicken: if you're using the calculator within a field and switch away to another window it removes the calculator (which can, for example, leave you with only the number you just typed in and not the calculation you were trying to do). There have been several quirks with bill entries: ones done from the My Savings Plan page has invariably ended up backwards (deposits show up as bills and bills show up as deposits). They have worked from scratch entry on the bills page, and worked when selecting a transaction in the register to be a re-occurring bill (the only place I've found so far to attempt to set it up from the beginning as an average of previous transactions as well as it picking up the value of the selected basis). They have not worked when they were suggested. I think all this might be based on the limit in the Money 2004 converter: it put every account in as a Bank account...and Quicken doesn't allow you to change the account type. I would prefer they let you change between the relatively straightforward types: Cash, Savings, Bank, and Credit Card. I ended up going ahead and creating new accounts of the correct types for the ones that I have that were active. This gave me little things already so far like being able to specify that I want to pay the whole balance with my credit card accounts (one positive thing to notice: it hasn't tried to get me to do a credit card balance reduction thing yet; either it waits for me to ask...well, that's probably it). At least the cut and paste of the whole account transaction set worked effectively. The fact that it left complex split entries behind and made a new one threw me (same kind of problem I had with the converter).Other than the split problem (which was the biggest pain with the converter), I was not expecting to not have the loan accounts come over, or the complexity of the cash account for brokers having to be rebuilt within the investment account. Maybe sometime I'll give some extensive feedback on the converter. All-in-all, it was wonderful to have it. I wouldn't be this far along without it. That lack of qif import thing still is weird.So my investment accounts are still a mix of invalid information, but I should be nearing the close on getting the stuff I work with day-to-day in order. I have been tempted to go back and re-do all my bill entries back to October so I can start enjoying the My Savings Plan page reflecting them all, but I really need to get caught up so that I can work on other things...the real history will come soon enough. Hopefully having moved to November will help me stop thinking about that. No major glitches so far with My Savings Plan. I need to remember to survey in November for any credits to expense accounts. I've also had my first item forgotten from a previous month that I'm trying to be careful to not let cause balance confusion. Connecting to banks / online download has been majority unsuccessful so far, but I'm going to try and be patient because I will attribute it to the date set on my computer...since Discover was so helpful to tell me that's why it refused to work with me. Oh, another thing I got done was getting all the bills entered. My main credit card account wouldn't delete, but it let me "not show it in Quicken" which caused the 3 State Farm bills that I had to just put themselves in a deposit account (at least when viewed) and not show in My Savings Plan. The matching thing is my most feared one at this point...it seems to be matching so little, but again, I'll have to reserve final judgment until I get current. I'm planning on using all three methods of working around expense credits: accumulation of them in a designated account until the end of the month, using the designated account to hold reductions in charges to the accounts, and entering additional income as income on the cash flow page and then manually upping the amount in the fund (which is using the core of the particular brilliance of the My Savings Page concept). I'm still disliking the 4 buttons over the values thing in the check register. Will definately mess with that some time. Sticking with the 2 line register for now...trying to change as little of the settings as possible with my normal philosophy to make the most sense of things and be able to help others the most by making mine as little unique as possible. Well, I'm going to go see if Regions web site has clunkily absorbed my attempted use of their option to select Quicken as my destination for transactions. Hmm, this stuff takes time, but it's motivating me to steal it from sleep, and that's one of the signs I've looked for as things that I should be okay with as hobbies or ministry.

Coming soon: November 2007

I really like the artifacts of a process...all the chaff created by trying to get to the final result. That means I should have started blogging the first time I had the idea that I should do something formal with this. Well...I didn't have the idea clearly until someone encouraged me. I knew I wanted to start encouraging people in this area before that -- I hoped I had something to offer. That's been a year or two. The external encouragement came only about 6 months ago.