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Hi! This is Alfred on behalf of Expert Village. In this video I would like to talk about using
Quicken or Microsoft Money for helping you with your budget and keeping track of your
expenses. In the Quicken and Microsoft Money, every time you make a deposit, write a check
or pay a credit card bill or dispatch an electronic payment, you are asked to assign it to a particular
category such as salary, clothing, groceries, childcare or health insurance. You also can
also create sub-categories in dividing auto expenses for example into fuel, insurance
and service. The program comes with a set of categories that handle most of the basics.
You can edit the list and create the categories that make better sense for your particular
household. The drawback of course is that entering and categorizing all your income
and outflow is a tedious chore. You can reduce the tedium by judicially selecting categories.
Let's say you are only worried about tracking your spending for recreation and leisure pursuits.
You can create categories that cover those types of expenses and let everything accumulate
under miscellaneous revenue or miscellaneous expenses. The problem with that approach is
that you fore go the opportunity to spot problems in other spending areas that you might not
even be aware of. A better solution is to track expenses using electronic banking that
way you can download your payments and deposits directly from the bank rather than entering
them by hand. Downloaded banking transactions generally show up with any categorization
meaning you will have to add the categories by hand. But if you use a credit card that
is issued by a bank permits electronic access, then the downloaded charges from your card
sometimes do come with categories attached. They are not always right so check them. Either
way once you've got your spending tracked by categories, drawing up a report requires
only a few clicks of the mouse. Even better such programs often have a automatic budget
creation feature that scans your spending in the past in order to estimate how much
you'll spend going forward.