Free Personal Budget Software Useful Or Not

Q: I'm using Quicken 2002 to track a family budget. I love the software as it makes it easy to record all of our families spending. I have used quicken off and on for years, but have been using the same budget since September. My problem has to do with adjusting the amounts budgeted for different categories. Let me use an example.. I give myself 100 dollars of personal money per month. That was good for the period of Sept - Dec of last year. Now I have decided, because of financial changes, to increase my personal money to 130 dollars. If I go into the budget settings and change the amount of personal money to 130, quicken changes my budgeted amount from Sept. thru the current Month (january) instead of just changing the budgeted amount from January on. This messes up my budget reports, which is the main reason I use Quicken. Another example is Christmas Money. My wife got 150 dollars from my in-laws.. I could find no way to add this to her personal money account without messing up my budget.

A: On the upper right side under Income Other, Method are three radio buttons. Click "Monthly detail" and you will see 12 boxes, one for each month of the year. You can modify the contents of any or all boxes to suit your needs. I'm not clear about whether this is the same problem as above, or a different one. If it is a different problem, please post back with some more detail. (Her "personal money account"? Affects your budget? Are you trying to maintain/use two different budgets?) It sounds to me like "personal money" is an expense category, maybe with a subcategory for "husband" and a subcategory for "wife". If that's the case, here's one way to deal with the situation: 1) Deposit the gift check in the bank, with the offsetting category/subcategory as "Personal Money:Wife." 2) When the wife spends her new-found mad money on something, (for sake of example, I'll assume she writes a check) enter the check in the bank account, again with the offsetting category/subcategory as "Personal Money:Wife." The net effect of these two transaction is that the $150 completely "disappears" in the accounting records (i.e., +$150 - $150 = $0) and your comparison of budgeted "Personal Money:Wife" to actual "Personal Money:Wife" is not distorted. .

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