Well, so far so good. I must say there is alot to it and it can easily get crazy, especially when you start punching all your numbers it, it can just get hairy. I think there are some simplier ways to view the information, but I like seeing everything up front and digesting it…then I think nothing is getting past me.
Inputting all my accounts was a breeze. Every account except my bank and my school loans hooked up to the internet automatically. And to touch on what I mentioned in my last post about MS Money, I spoke with my bank and found out there is a free way to get my bank information into MS Money. It just requires me to log into my banking site manually and download a ofx file and then just import that into Money. Its really not that big of a deal, not a big effort. I may even write a little program to take care of it for me.
The bills thing seems alittle more complicated. I am still mastering that one. Can’t seem to figure out if there is a way to link your accounts and bills, like if I have a credit card and its due date is the 13th, then put a recurring bill in the bill section for me. I don’t know, maybe I don’t understand how it is supposed to work yet.
The 401k thing seems nice, although I don’t know enough about my 401k to be able to punch it into Money. You can put in what stocks its in, how many shares you have, etc and it can tell you to-the-day what its worth. But I think I can dumb it down enough to just say “here’s what I am putting in each pay period, keep track of that”, I will leave it up to my institution to track the investments and I’ll update accordingly.
But so far so good, I will try and stick to it.
