Be sure and post back with questions as you go. There are always some
struggles until there is the "light bulb moment" and you start understanding
what Money is trying to do.

"Jenny03" <Jenny03[at]discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:B547D733-84B2-4588-B19F-B978E23C863D[at]microsoft.com...
- quote -

Dick,

Thanks for the great reply. I have used Quicken a bit, but don't know much
about it or Money. I downloaded the 60 day trial of Money to give it a test
run.

I think I will try your way and see how it works for me.

Thanks,
Jenny

Dick,

Thanks for the great answer. I have used Quicken just a bit, but I don't
know much about it or Money. I downloaded the free trial of Money to try it
out to see I wanted to purchase it.

I think I will try your way and see how I like it. All I know is I need a
way to keep track of expenses.

Thanks Again,
Jenny

Money lets you define your periodic income and expenses and to categorize
them appropriately. (E.g., I get paychecks weekly that have Wages:Salary and
Taxes:Social Security and Insurance:Medical income and expenses along with
transfers to my savings and 401k accounts. I have monthly Utilities:Phone
and annual Taxes:Auto Registration expenses. I transfer money from my
checking account to my Discover account monthly to pay for the expenses I
incurred on Discover that month. And so on.) In Money you can define
scheduled transactions to recognize each of these.

You also define accounts that have money (checking, savings) or are owed
money (Discover, home mortgage) or hold investments (401k, IRA). These
accounts are more or less just like a series of checkbook registers. They
have a starting balance, dated and occasionally numbered deposit and
withdrawal transactions (or debits and credits), and running balances. When
scheduled transactions occur, Money can enter them in the registers for the
appropriate accounts or in two accounts where that makes sense. The latter
case is something like a payment form checking to Discover. You can also
enter transactions that are not scheduled but occur nonetheless. (Examples
include money spent at the grocery store for Food:Groceries from checking,
money spent for Automobile:Gasoline using the Discover account.)

(Let's digress for a moment. This transaction data, the bulk of the data
maintained in Money, can be entered by hand--my preference--or, in many
cases, with many banks and financial institutions (FI), for many people
under many circumstances with relatively few problems and only some
additional hand touchup, can be entered from data downloaded over the net
from the FI directly or via a third party working for Microsoft and
accessing your banks' websites using your account data you use to login to
that website directly. A lot of people have generally good luck getting this
downloaded transaction data to match up correctly with the items they've
scheduled and/or entered by hand to avoid duplicate entries. Note that there
are a lot of qualifications as to how the downloaded stuff works. Thus is
why I avoid it and do not recommend it to others. Just look at this
newsgroup and you'll see dozens of people having problems making this work
each week. On the other hand, I certainly appreciate that the manual data
entry is a significant undertaking. End of digression.)

Money can do lots of things with all of this information and some history of
these transactions actually happening in the accounts and some history of
transactions you don't normally schedule but do normally record. It allows
you to define a budget based on the scheduled things you tell it about and
its figuring out from your transaction history how much you haven't
scheduled. It does this by category of income and expense generally without
regard to account. (After all, it really doesn't matter whether you bought
gas from cash in your pocket or a check or Discover card. You spent and will
continue to spend the money.) With the budget, Money can tell you whether in
aggregate you are planning to spend more or less than your income over time.
And it can tell you whether your spending and income in recent months
compared favorably to your plan. With this, you can assess whether your
plans for spending are achievable and/or sustainable.

Money can also make cash flow and account balance projections into the
future without regard to the categories of income and expense involved. This
helps answer questions like whether you will have money in your checking
account three months from now to pay the car registration.

And it can do all of these things without resorting to the behavioral
modification subterfuge of envelope accounting--the general use people want
subaccounts for.

Have you ever used a personal finance management software tool?

"Jenny03" <Jenny03[at]discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:F2768AF1-6046-4C34-8F06-BB091FE1A5E9[at]microsoft.com...
- quote -

Dick,

Thanks for your reply. If you have a better way of keeping track of such
items, I'd love to hear it.

Jenny

"Dick Watson" wrote:

- quote -

Money doesn't work that way/support subaccounts. I could tell you the
reasons why they are not necessary, but if the notion works for you, I will
skip it.

I believe Quicken supports subaccounts.

"Jenny03" <Jenny03[at]discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:65ACB7E0-77D1-42CB-ABF7-7010C3BF6CCC[at]microsoft.com...
- quote -

I am looking at purchasing Money, but want a way to track several different
catagories within my bank account. For example I want to know how much I
have saved in my bank for car registration and such. Is it possible to add
subcatorgies to the bank accounts?
Thanks,