Not so Quick(en)

I've been using Quicken to track my finances for so long I hate to even think how much money I've given them. Heck, I was using it for electronic bill payment before the web took over our lives. Over the years, each succeeding upgrade has added more and more complexity. Every so often, they force an upgrade by changing the protocol used by the bank, so not upgrading isn't always an option. I went right along, adding my 401(k), pension, credit cards, mortgage, salary - including taxes and other deductions, and everything else finance related.

Sticking to the theme of this place, simplifying my life it wasn't! I kept wishing they'd put out Quicken Lite or something. I mostly need a running balance to see how much month is left at the end of the paycheck.

For a brief time, I switched to Moneydance, during the blissful time in which I banished Vista from my PC in favor of Ubuntu Linux. Moneydance was nice, and not so byzantine as Quicken. It could do everything I needed, including online bank access, and I could have kept on using it with Windows since it's available on any OS that can run Java. There's a story as to why I'm not using either of those anymore (and why I'll probably switch back) but that will have to wait.

Circumstance helped out a little. My company changed 401(k) management, and I lost the ability to access my funds directly, so the 401(k) was dropped. Then my company was consumed by another company, and away went the pension, so I stopped tracking that. But, I was still overwhelmed by the details, the worst of which was having umpteen categories for tracking items.

So, a while back I put into place a radical idea I'd been pondering for a couple of years. I blew away all the categories in Quicken like Groceries, Phone, Gas, Electric, Rent, Mortgage, Insurance, Net Salary, etc, etc, etc, ad nauseum, and replaced the lot of them with a small handful such as Earned It, Spent It, Shelter, Locomotion, Necessities and Servitude.

Bliss. Makes for a nice compact little pie chart when I care enough to see where the money went.