All this talk about stimulus, mortgages and losing jobs has gotten me to put some real thought into what I want to be doing and how to get there.
I’ve decided to explore a major career change and go back to school to become a vet tech. I’ve always wanted to work with animals, it has been a lifelong dream. When I was a kid I wanted to be a vet until I realized you have to hurt the animals sometimes. Funny how a kid’s brain works. It was never really encouraged at my house so I never pursued it. Now that the big four-oh is less than a month away it is about time to do what I want and not what I think I should be doing just to make the big bucks. There is a local trade school that I can attend and I’ve sent away for more info. I’m going to talk to the vet techs at our vet and get more info on education and day to day responsibilities.
What this means is a major lifestyle change. My income will drop by more than 2/3 and I will be taking night classes for about 14 months. I can’t afford to stop working and going to school during the day, which is fine. That will give me time to get my financial life straightened out so we can do OK on that dramatic of an income loss.
To that end I need to do a thorough scrub of our finances and really look at where our money has gone for the last 12 months. I’ve been using www.mint.com for daily and monthly tracking but it is falling short in some areas.
What do you all use to analyze your spending? I’ve used Quicken, MSN Money and Quickbooks in the past. Anything else out there that is better?
Thanks! I’ve been smiling ever since I’ve decided this.
Jen,
Wow. It is a big leap to make a change as big as this one, and I sincerely hope it works out for you. I tried a smaller change (software R&D → CS dept. head) and hated it, but the wife of a good friend of mine went from being a King County prosecuting attorney to the leader of a Christian church in southern Washington and has not regretted it for a minute. Mine was somewhat layoff driven, although I turned down another offer to take the academic job and I took it more out of curiosity than passion. My friend’s wife’s decision was more a case of a “follow my passion” (and yours sounds like that as well), which may account for the difference in outcomes.
I’ve used Quicken or Money for the last many years on Windows boxes and been happy with the analysis tools they have. If you are on a Mac, then there are other options I looked into a while back and I can dig up that list again if you like.
Quicken is the only thing I’ve ever used for personal stuff and Quickbooks for all my corporate stuff. I’ve been using these products for over 18 years and they have always done what I needed them to do. I just finished setting up a new budget for 2009 so we can trim our discretionary spending. It’s amazing the type of analysis you can do once you’ve got your expenses going in on consistent basis. I can’t even imagine trying to reconcile my credit card or bank account without a product such as this.
Good luck on the new career. Sounds pretty exciting!
I started off using MS Money for awhile and then switched to Quicken. Neither are perfect but I preferred Quicken over Money and have been using it for about 5 years now.
I was about to grab Money because I can get it for cheap but the hubby said he wasn’t sure they were going to keep making it so I got Quicken. They are having a “sale” right now of $20 off.
Just what I love to do on a Sunday. Stare at how much money I spend each month. Yuck.
I just rebalanced my accounts this morning. I do it about once every 2 weeks or so or whenever I get bored. It’s pretty interesting seeing where your money goes.
I would stay away from Quicken unless you want to update it every so often with a new version. The darn thing will stop working after so many months. With MS Money, the only thing that stops will be the stock price updates which is no big deal.
Quicken is good but when you buy the newer versions they keep trying to sell more and more stuff and I really just want the product I bought. Which is why I still use Quicken 99 and it works just fine. Honestly, how many ways are there to balance a checkbook or set up a budget?
I downloaded Quicken and setting up the accounts is a nightmare. For some reason my login/passwords aren’t working for some accounts. SOoooo frustrating. Once I set it up though I’m sure it will be fine.
Problem is none of this is fun. I need to have some cookies as a reward or something every time I use it.
Thanks everyone. I’m looking at a 2.5 year plan for reducing our monthly living expenses where we can live on his salary and by then I can be done with school. Pay off the car, etc. We’ve been living high off the hog for a year now so it will be a challenge.
Used Quicken previously, but I was single and not focused enough to get a lot of value. Seemed ok. I ended up quitting once I really hosed the setup by trying to add additional accounts. Either it wasn’t working great, or I was too confused, but when I had my credit card and debit card accounts in it I think it bonked. It didn’t seem to like (or again, maybe I couldn’t figure out how they did it) having money going between the two accounts (I pay the CC with the debit).
Used wesabe.com for a bit, didn’t really like it. Very flexible, but I found too little structure and didn’t like how it was so tag based.
Now I use both Mint.com and BOA’s budget tool. Mint does a great job auto-categorizing things, but I find it to be HORRIFIC, HORRIBLE, ATROCIOUS and an utter failure as a budget tool. It always redoes my budget amounts with its own auto-average calculations. So if I were to pay extra towards my mortgage principal one month, it’d adjust my mortgage budget up. But not ask me, just do it. Which I hate, that’s useless. Why keep nudging it up? That defeats the purpose of a budget. You could just keep spending more and more and your budget amount would always be close to good. Stupid.
Maybe I’m using it wrong? Have you had this issue? I also haven’t liked how you can’t remove the highlest level spending categories from the budget view, and how the total for the month is the total of the spending shown in the view. It just adds all the highlest level spending categories, and any sub-categories in there. It double counts things. So the first time my wife looked in there she thought we had spent 150% of our monthly income (because of all the double counting).
BOA’s tool has been working great for us. It’s not that flexible, but does the basics I need it to do. And it’s free.
The reason I have Mint is a backup should we ever have to leave BOA.
I really needed an online tool so we could both check out balances from our office’s (and wasn’t willing to do any crazy steps to enabline logging in to the home PC from work, too many security issues). I briefly looked at Quicken online.
The darn thing will stop working after so many months.
Not true at all. I’m using Quicken 2001 and it’s just fine.
I have to restate my claim. Quicken stops working with on-line updates. So that means that you cannot download your transactions and records from your bank or credit card company after a period of time. You cannot reconcile your statements automatically. At least with Microsoft Money, the on-line updates from your financial companies can still be imported, only the stock quotes stop working. As I recall, the imports of the transactions for Quicken stop working at this time also.
This was from the Quicken website:
Product Discontinuation Date
Quicken 98 April 20, 2004
Quicken 99 April 20, 2004
Quicken 2000 May 18, 2004
Quicken 2001 April 19, 2005
Quicken 2002 April 19, 2005
Quicken 2003 April 25, 2006
Quicken 2004 April 30, 2007
Quicken 2005 April 30, 2008
Quicken 2006 April 30, 2009
Ah, I see. That might be why I’m not having a problem with Quicken and others are. I never download anything from my financial instituations. I manually reconcile everything. I don’t get why you would want to download. One of the reasons I use Quicken is to make sure there aren’t problems with my bank or credit card statement. It seems to me that if you’re downloading stuff then you’re not double-checking it. I’m probably missing something, but my system works for me, so I’m not going to change it.
Alas, money did the same thing. IIRC I had 2004, and it stopped syncing, they now give you 2 years (i think) of auto syncing, then you have to pay, or upgrade money… You can still manually download from your institution, but the auto-update stops.
(It actually tells you when it will expire in the “Help-About MS Money” tab.)
Ah, I see. That might be why I’m not having a problem with Quicken and others are. I never download anything from my financial instituations. I manually reconcile everything. I don’t get why you would want to download. One of the reasons I use Quicken is to make sure there aren’t problems with my bank or credit card statement. It seems to me that if you’re downloading stuff then you’re not double-checking it. I’m probably missing something, but my system works for me, so I’m not going to change it.
When you download it, it doesn’t commit it right away. You have to reconcile it first, so it amounts to the same thing as reconciling against your statement, except you can do it every day/week/whatever instead of every month.
Same here. I enter everything in manually. Yes, it takes up a lot of time, but it makes me look at every single transaction which is good for me. Also, it takes maybe 45 minutes every 2 weeks.
Funny how a kid’s brain works. It was never really encouraged at my house so I never pursued it. Now that the big four-oh is less than a month away it is about time to do what I want and not what I think I should be doing just to make the big bucks. There is a local trade school that I can attend and I’ve sent away for more info. I’m going to talk to the vet techs at our vet and get more info on education and day to day responsibilities.