Hi Jaysen; I moved from a Quicken product back in August and went through a similar process. I approached the conversion a little differently.
My first step was to watch all the tutorials (which are great) to get a feel how the MoneyWell product worked. I also tried to understand the bucket approach which is simple but can be confusing to start because it is a different approach from the one used by Quicken and other financial products. The key understanding for me was that MoneyWell has Accounts which relate directly to the bank, credit card, investments etc that we have in financial institutions. Buckets are ways for us to organize our income and expenses to help us manage spending. MoneyWell can be set- up as complex as we want or like you I decided to set-up my buckets using the kiss principle. I went through all my statements (electricity, heating, etc) to define my monthly fixed category expenses. This wasn't too hard because they all come on separate statements. The next step was to then look at Credit Cards to see what else was spent. My goal on this was to make sure that I could track where the money was going. My assumption is if I don't know where the money is spent, then I can't manage it. I then created my next set of expense budgets around this analysis (and it has evolved as I use the product). I created accounts for gifts, dining, yard work etc. I still tried to keep it simple by not creating to many expense buckets (like a gift bucket for everyone in my family). This also helped in getting a budget together with the spending plan. I would create one interest expense bucket to track all interest paid (not mortgage) unless you want to track specific interest paid. I would not keep track of Mortgage Interest because this is a living expense like rent that I have little control over and my bank does not break down the interest amount each month. I found with other financial products I was recording a lot of information which really had no purpose. With MoneyWell I get a true picture of what I wanted to budget to actual expenses and by moving money between buckets when I overspend, I very quickly understood the areas of my spending that I needed to change. A comment on history. My approach to history was to only load the history required to reconcile my next set of statements. If I needed to look at history I would go back to Quicken and get the information. Since MoneyWell is a management approach I wanted to focus on the future and the new way of looking at spending. I did not want my prior history to take away from changing my approach. I therefore entered all outstanding transactions and recorded allocated them to mu new buckets. I then made the date that Kevin mentioned the first of the month where my spending plan started. This might be January 1 for you. I have not looked at history other than what id tracked in MoneyWell. You may want a more detailed look at history and therefore require the load. Starting fresh eliminated a lot of those issues with negative numbers, where to put expenses (especially since they two applications did not match categories/buckets) and allowed me to use MoneyWell as designed. I hope this helps. Dan On Dec 17, 9:39 pm, Kevin Hoctor <[email protected]> wrote: > If you have imported a QIF file, your transactions should have come in > assigned to buckets. You should have all your historic transactions > assigned to buckets so you can watch your trends. > > Now if these were transfers in Quicken, they don't need to be assigned > a bucket. You can select all those, right-click and make them bucket > optional. > > Peace, > > Kevin Hoctor > No Thirst Software LLChttp://nothirst.com > > Sent from my iPhone > > On Dec 17, 2008, at 7:53 PM, Jaysen <[email protected]> wrote: > > > > > Based on your answer I think the question I am really asking is: > > should I be assigning imported transactions (prior to 12/17 which I am > > calling start date for manual accounts) into buckets? > > > Similarly: should historical payments (those made prio to day 0) be > > seen as transfers? > > > I think those are the big ones for now. > > > Do many quicken converts report negative number results when > > attempting to convert their quicken "budgets" to MoneyWell spending > > plans? I think the difference is in the way the way my categories are > > crossing with my buckets (I may be double counting) but according to > > what I just did I need to file for bankruptcy, 2 years ago. YIKES! > > > Thanks. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "No Thirst Software User Forum" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/no-thirst-software?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
