Last year I wrote an article about Quicken and now you know what I use to manage my personal finances. Well, if you’ve read recent blog posts, then you also know that I am now engaged. This is fantastic, but it does mean that I and my partner have a much larger span of finances that we both must be aware of and manage. Here’s how we’ve set things up, for now!
Let’s Jam!
Quicken, now Quicken Classic
First off, in the past half year since I wrote my last post about Quicken, they decided to do some rebranding. Now Quicken is known as Quicken Classic to refer to the Desktop installed version of Quicken. This Classic version is what I use, specifically the Windows version inside a virtual machine that I run in the background on my iMac. Convoluted, yes, but I have so much old history in Quicken that it’s not quite worth my time trying to migrate to Quicken for Mac or some other platform, at least for this year. Everything you read here is using the Home & Business edition of Quicken. With that bit of housekeeping out of the way, let’s go!
Account Naming Convention
Between partner and me, we have 48 active accounts, assets, and liabilities already. These things are either in my name entirely or my partners name entirely. And this count is not including joint accounts and assets that are in both our names! That’s a lot to keep track of and reconcile! To help make the Accounts list clear who exactly owns the account we agreed on this naming convention like this below where $Account Name is the name of the account:
- M- $Account_Name — for accounts in my, Mr. ToW’s, name
- R- $Account_Name — accounts future Mrs. ToW has
- F- $Account_Name — Family things we jointly own
Here are examples:
- M- Chase Ink Credit Card
- R- Citi Bank Debit Card
- F- Ally Checking Account
This convention allows us to track _everything_ in Quicken and know at a glance what we’re looking at. This also servers a foundation for setting up reports that are meaningful to our three contexts of: 1) his, 2) hers, 3) theirs.
Quicken Tagging vs. Categories
I researched extensively and put much thought into how to set Quicken up in a way that is not so burdensome to maintain that we get frustrated and stop using it altogether, and yet allows us to slice and dice the reports as we want. My conclusion is to NOT do this using categories. You should only have one category for something. In other words, only one “Food” category and not three categories something like “Food-Mr,” “Food-Hers”, “Food-Ours”. The best setup I’ve found so far is ONE category just like always and instead to use Tags.
Tagging Convention
We have setup the following tagging convention. Transactions that belong solely to one of us gets tagged with our name. For example, if I buy a new toy just for myself, I tag it “His”. If Mrs. ToW busy something just for herself, she tags it “Hers”. This is very easy to keep track of when transactions are within the named accounts because we assume that all transactions in the account fall into the appropriate bucket. But what if we buy a personal item from the joint accounts, or one of us buys something owned by the family from their individual accounts?
For this scenario we have three tags: FAM, FAM-HIS, FAM-HERS
Quicken Classic on Windows has a lot of flexibility to customize reports to slice and dice and look at only what we care about.
Reporting
We setup several reports and grouped them into Folders:
- Reports for Mr. ToW – with reports relevant to me
- Reports for future Mrs. ToW – with reports relevant to my partner
- Reports for Family – with reports relevant to the family finances
Reports of Adventures – reports to help us see how much we spent cumulatively on major events and trips.
A big annoyance with this tagging setup is that Quicken does not have capabilities to filter tags and combine them. If I have two transactions and one is tagged with “FAM” and the second tagged with FAM:Vegas, these are two separate tags, and in the report if you say only give me transactions with tag “FAM”, Quicken will correctly provide both transactions, but as two groupings instead of rolling up to the FAM tag. This is super annoying and frustrating. I export this report out and fix the filtering in Excel, but I should not have to do that.
Tagging Big Events
We then have tags prefixed with “Adventure-$year-$title”. For example, we have “Adventure-2023-Last Vegas” for our trip to Las Vegas last year. We have a tag “Adventure-2024-Wedding” that we tag all our wedding related expenses. We can then setup reports that filter on only these tags and get a sense of how much we have spent on travel and so forth.
Hope that’s Useful!
I really hope that’s useful to you to see how we have setup our finances in Quicken. It provides each of us freedom to continue to manage our own wealth, and yet have visibility and awareness to each other’s finances, and manage the family budget, all in one place. Well, that’s the hope and dream at least! Perhaps in a year’s time after we are married, and we see if this setup has longevity, I will come back to this post to provide an update. Until then, cheers!
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