Yes, I only look at FCF for Checking and Savings. All other accounts revolve
around the cash in these anyway. I don't let FCF show any Budgeted items
because that causes problems. As you note, the average amount of the
scheduled transfer to Discover and M+ Visa is picked to cover the cash flow
associated with most all of the budgeted spending anyway.

If BP worked in sane ways, I might include it in FCF--or pay some attention
to the FCF for the Discover account where it would put automatically want to
put lots of things like Food:Groceries anyway. But I surely will not spend
$100 each and every month for Vacation:Airfare. The inability of BP to be
very smart at all about budgeted items that do not occur monthly is the
prime deterrent that make BP more or less worthless to me on anything other
than, say, an annual basis. I am also long on record that BP should not
assume scheduled bills are in budget by definition. (As noted, I schedule
most everything, frequently including things that I would never have
budgeted for.)

"Chris Cowles" <NoSpam[at]For.me> wrote in message
news:%23GXZh16zFHA.1192[at]TK2MSFTNGP10.phx.gbl...
- quote -

From your description it sounds like you forecast primarily your main
checking account(s). I had been forecasting my main checking account and my
main credit card together, and including budget forecasts. The goal was to
model net cash, but it didn't work well.

I just tried excluding the credit card and still including budget. Only two
small budget categories other than scheduled bills are associated with
checking. I would say the cash flow forecast does reflect the common
pattern of my checking account balance better than checking plus credit card
combined.

Most predictable payments are scheduled, including payments to my primary
credit card. That's manually estimated based on the past two years'
payments. They're fairly consistent. All other budget categories are either
scheduled, or associated with my credit card. Since the payment to the
credit card is scheduled, non-checking budget categories are emulated by
that estimated payment.
--
Chris Cowles
Gainesville, FL




"Dick Watson" <littlegreengecko[at]mind-enufalready-spring.com> wrote in
message news:egy1C05zFHA.1968[at]TK2MSFTNGP10.phx.gbl...
- quote -

Chris/Dick,

Thanks guys. I have been doing in Excel approximately what you are doing in
Money. I will take a much closer look at the Planner and Cash Flow tools
and hopefully be able to eliminate my spreadsheets.

Regards,

Bill

Forecast Cash Flow is my most important use of Money, far and away. I get
very accurate results. I don't let it project budgeted items. I do have
almost everything that can be scheduled scheduled. That includes things like
projections of when OASDI will be paid off and the associated changes in
cash flow for the remaining n paychecks in the year. I also have scheduled
things like the Discover transfer in terms of projected average payments and
adjust the scheduled amounts as necessary based on known recent or
soon-to-come-due transactions. The ability to edit specific transactions in
a scheduled series has greatly improved accuracy--but there is a maintenance
cost. If I send in a rebate, I schedule it to be deposited. (This has the
added advantage to remind me when it's time to call them and convince them
I'm not going to forget they owe it to me and I'll pester them until the day
they die if they thing they can forget paying it. This is particularly
useful for CompUSA rebates.) By the first week of January, I'll have the tax
refund/tax due transactions scheduled with approximate numbers. And so on.
With the exception of a built-in reserve to allow for an ATM withdrawal at
any time and unplanned expenses/income, my cash flow projections for 60-90
days out are reliably within -$100/+$300. (They're tuned to be pessimistic.)

I concur with what Chris C. said about LP.

"William R Wood" <w.wood[at]cox.net> wrote in message
news:ugX39Z2zFHA.3188[at]TK2MSFTNGP14.phx.gbl...
- quote -

Cash flow forecast is dependent on how complete your bill scheduler and
budget are. I'm still not very confident in it because small changes can
cause wild variations.

The Lifetime Planner seems to be more reliable, when you take into
consideration how much of a WAG it is. The more events you can model into
your future (car purchases, trading down from your present large house
sometime in the future, kids leaving home, etc.), the better it will be. But
you can examine the predicted cash events for a certain future year and use
the details in it to determine your own level of confidence.

What I wasn't impressed with about the LP, but I can't expect more from a
program that costs me $20, is that it charges me for early withdrawals from
tax-deferred savings accounts to meet predicted cash needs, in the same
years I'm making contributions to the same accounts. If the predicted needs
are accurate, what is more likely to happen is that I would simply reduce my
contributions, rather than make the contributions and pay a penalty to take
them back out.

In general, I do find the LP a useful tool, with reasonable accuracy. It's
also dependent on your budget, from whence it gets your predicted living
expenses. It took me awhile to figure out that the 'living expenses' part of
LP excludes taxes, but by analyzing the numbers, I gained confidence in that
part.
--
Chris Cowles
Gainesville, FL



"William R Wood" <w.wood[at]cox.net> wrote in message
news:ugX39Z2zFHA.3188[at]TK2MSFTNGP14.phx.gbl...
- quote -

Chris,

Wow, sounds like you had a major project to handle. Glad to hear it was
worth it overall however. My new file is still running real fast after
about 6 months of hard use.

I am curious about your mention of the Lifetime Planner and cash flow
forecast. I have never used either except to briefly fiddle with them.
Since they produced wildly inaccurate numbers in my brief tryout I dismissed
them as useless. Does this stuff really work if you set it up properly.
Maybe I should try them again?

Thanks

Bill Wood

"William R Wood" <w.wood[at]cox.net> wrote in message
news:%23sAditCxFHA.2252[at]TK2MSFTNGP09.phx.gbl...
- quote -

I can corroborate Bill's claims of speed improvements on an
exported/imported file. I think this is how Money is supposed to operate,
and it's totally satisfactory. I'm not sure I can recommend the process
required to get there, though. I definitely cannot recommend it if you're
not comfortable editing details of your Money transactions, and have a
fairly good understanding of how Money works.

Unlike Bill (as he detailed in posts subsequent to the one above), I had
several loan accounts, most of which were closed. I also have a HELOC, and
do online banking. Those last two facts are relevant because you can't merge
a downloaded online credit account to an existing one, if it's associated
with an asset. You can merge it if you temporarily disassociate it from the
asset, which is really the only thing that makes a HELOC a HELOC, in Money.

Completing the process required several false starts and lots of manual data
entry. The biggest problem was that the sequence of importing the accounts
is important, as is whether you specify account recovery or bank statement
import.

My recall of the final process is blurry. Of my major accounts, I think I
imported my investment accounts first, credit accounts second, and main
checking account last. You can't export asset accounts but, if there are
transactions associated with them in credit or bank accounts, Money will
prompt you to create them for those transfers. The asset accounts will be
incomplete at that point, though, and the only way to finish them is to
manually value the beginning balances, and to add missing transactions.

The worst part was recreating loan accounts. Bank transactions affecting
them simply create expense categories with the same name as the loan, when
the bank account is imported. You have to build the loan account from
scratch using the information from your old account, then manually edit the
checking transactions to reflect transaction details printed from the old
file.

In addition to recreating my loan accounts, I also had to recreate all my
scheduled bills and my budget. In recreating scheduled bills, I canceled
existing Apay transactions in the old account, then recreated them in the
new one after enabling online banking in it. Creating scheduled bills built
the skeleton of my budget, but I then had to fill in the rest from my old
budget. I'm still not done with that, for categories where I customized
expenses on a monthly basis (e.g., electricity and gas).

My Lifetime Planner is gone, yet to be rebuilt. If I had household
inventory, it would be gone, too.

Overall, this is a dramatic improvement. What's disappointing is that it
seems necessary to get the performance that is apparently possible. Money
really needs a repair tool that works, and the means to purge (not
necessarily archive) irrelevant stuff like old budgets and old bills. The
fact vestiges of old bills appear as ghosts in the budget tells me they're
never really gone, just hidden.

Russ, are you listening?

Chris Cowles,
Gainesville, FL


Objective differences:

Old size: 26MB

New size: 18MB

Old open time (to CPU % drop): 1:50
(The screen was up well before that, but CPU activity did not drop. I don't
have a Passport on the file. I do have a 12-month cash flow forecast on the
home page, showing my main checking account and offsetting credit card
account. Lifetime Planner is complete.)

New open time (to CPU % drop): 0:11
(Yes, 11 seconds. I don't have a Passport on the file. I do have 12-month
cash flow forecast on the home page, showing my main checking account and
offsetting credit card account. The budget may be incomplete, compared to
the old file, but most of the categories are filled in. Lifetime Planner is
not recreated yet.)

Differences in display of the budget summary are almost as dramatic.

Properly setup NAT **is** a firewall, of sorts.

I've personally seen unprotected Win98 boxes--directly on the net, not
hidden behind NAT--attacked in a matter of minutes by address scanners that
neither know nor care whether you are hp.com or
whocares.somenode.someisp.net. You're just the next 32-bit address in the
upcount.

Try your bet with, say, a stock Win98 gold, WinNT4, or Win2k gold box and no
NAT. I think you will be shocked. (Of course, your ISP may be looking out
for you as well.)

As to the quality and stability of the various software "security"
solutions, you will get no argument from me. As to the general level of the
threat as hyped, you'll get no argument from me. As to the real exposure
risk, you'll get no argument from me. As to the degree to which the problem
is aided and abetted by dumb users, you'll get no argument here, either. But
cleaning up after that crap is a Royal Pain In The A**. Not running a
firewall--properly setup NAT counts in my book--is like inviting it in.

"William R Wood" <w.wood[at]cox.net> wrote in message
news:%23l9CaNEyFHA.3000[at]TK2MSFTNGP12.phx.gbl...
- quote -

Dick/Chris,

I tried all the virus, firewall stuff and it is totally useless in my
opinion. The vendors vastly overhype the dangers. Prudence works better
and does not interfere with other programs. How many hundreds/thousands of
times have you heard folks battling conflicts caused by antivirus or
firewall software? You can spend your life updating all this stuff and
never get ahead of it. As Dick notes there are always day 0 attacks.

What I do does not apply to businesses, only ordinary people. My son works
in high level networking support for HP and they use very sophisticated
firewall software and hardware to protect the corporate network. Bill Jr
works from home a lot and it is a major hassle even for him to VPN into the
company network because of all the security. But HP is a big fat target.
You and me are not.

I do run Windows firewall and it has not caused me any problems but I would
never use any of the 3rd party firewall software. I also run my computers
behind a router with NAT which is far superior to any software firewall and
creates zero conflicts. As noted I also run Firefox to reduce my
vulnerability. What I am doing is prudent for the typical home user. There
are of course people who will click on anything, reply to emails from Uganda
and give unsolicited callers personal info over the phone. No amount of
fancy software is going to help these folks because they are hopeless.

Computer savvy people can, of course, handle the antivirus/firewall setup
and usage issues but I still submit that they are completely useless for the
typical home user- pure hype by the vendors who seek personal profit not
public protection. In over 20 years of full time computer work, I have
never seen or heard of a real, documented attack on a home user that could
not have been prevented with simple prudence.

Also look at the worst case scenario - a hacker steals all of your data.
Well, so what?? Exactly what is a hacker going to do with all my letters
and bank info? I monitor my financial data daily so a hacker will get in
exactly one charge on my credit card before I call and have it cancelled.
Then I notify everybody else. Hacker gets nothing but one charge. I am not
responsible for unauthorized charges so my exposure = zero. Since my
exposure is zero why should I harass myself for my entire life maintaining
and updating antivirus etc software on the off chance that some nut will
pick me out of 200 million people to hack?

And consider this: The worst case hacker scenario is actually not the worst
case or even the most likely. The real risk is some thief physically
stealing all of your computers - you loose all your data, the thief gets all
your data and you loose your hardware as well!! Antivirus/firewall software
ain't gonna prevent that

I bet I can plug a bare computer (no protection of any kind) into my
internet cable and run it full time for a year and it will never be touched


But I agree YMMV

Regards

Bill




"Chris Cowles" <NoSpam[at]For.me> wrote in message
news:Oi5eATDyFHA.2676[at]TK2MSFTNGP10.phx.gbl...
- quote -

It doesn't matter if it's day 0 or day 43. He doesn't run any antivirus.

Bill, I infer that you may use Windows firewall. While it works for your
practices, I think most users would be hacked within days. Your advice about
not opening emails is more than some people can do and still be productive.
Properly (and minimally) configured security software should not impose an
undue overhead. It will do a lot to prevent attacks, which are far more
costly in productivity.

YMMV.
--
Chris Cowles
Gainesville, FL



Dick Watson wrote:
- quote -

I hope you use a firewall of some kind. There are still day 0 attacks out
there.

"William R Wood" <w.wood[at]cox.net> wrote in message
news:uPyn8vByFHA.3772[at]TK2MSFTNGP11.phx.gbl...
- quote -

"Iain Sillars" <sillarsidelete[at]logica.com> wrote in message
news:l6p1k1too85s51ocouklpnkceh46khtkqq[at]4ax.com...

snip

- quote -

lain,

Assuming you meant 1GB memory and not 1MB, your computer should run Money
fine, maybe not instantaneous but reasonably fast. You did not specifically
mention the operating system but I am assuming it is XP Pro. So if Money is
making you get coffee while you wait for things to happen, its your computer
setup.

I am virtually positive your problem is all the unnecessary protection
software you are running. I would strongly recommend that you so a clean
reinstall of XP Pro (meaning a fresh install on a completely formatted hard
drive) to eradicate all traces of this bogus software and then reinstall
only your legitimate application software.

I strongly recommend that you not reinstall McAfee, PestPatrol,
Spywareblaster, FreeRam, or ZoneAlarm. I don't know what PGP is or
Turbonote or Netmeter. The virus stuff/spyware/firewall stuff is more
trouble than it is worth. I have been connected to the internet 24x7 for
over 15 years and I have never had a virus, spyware or hacker or anything
else bother me. I never use any anti-virus, spyware or 3rd party firewall
software. Or utilities like FreeRam which I assume is some type of memory
enhancer. These programs cause multiple problems and do nothing positive in
my opinion. Get rid of them and practice common sense on the internet and
you will not have problems. Don't open email attachments, don't respond to
email from people you don't know, don't click on links sent to you by others
you don't know, don't go to bogus sounding websites.

If you do a fresh install of XP Pro, then bring Windows and IE6 up to date
using Windows Update you will be safe. Keep XP and IE updated with Window
update. Run XP's firewall if you like. Consider running Firefox instead of
IE. I do and I like it. Then install Money and see what happens. I bet it
will run real fast.


Regards,

Bill Wood
Fountain Hills, AZ

On Thu, 29 Sep 2005 05:19:23 -0700, "William R Wood" <w.wood[at]cox.netwrote:
- quote -

McAfee VirusScan 8, PestPatrol, Spywareblaster, PGP 7.0.3, NetMeter,
TurboNote, FreeRAM XP Pro & ZoneAlarm.

Normally no other apps run, although "sometimes" Outlook 2K, Explorer
and IE6 might be open.

Switching off Personalised feedback suddenly speeded it up, but trying
to then access Cash Flow Review crashed it! Have not yet tried
editing the budget. Usually after changing somehting I have time to
make a coffee.

Iain

"Don Awalt" <donawalt[at]removethisgmail.com> wrote in message
news:%23OAR8NbxFHA.3588[at]tk2msftngp13.phx.gbl...
- quote -

Don,

Sorry I missed your post on this subject earlier but I am glad to hear it
also worked for you. I got about 12 years out of my original money file but
I intend to do the export/import thing about every 5 years from now on just
to keep the file clean.

Glad 2006 is running well. I tested it and liked it better than 03, 04 or
05 but I still refuse to upgrade from 2002 due to the annoying interface
changes, advertising and automatic expiration of downloads. BTW, after I
did the file conversion in 2002 my matching was messed up for a couple of
weeks. Money 2002 also learns as it goes and transaction matching is now
perfect again.

Regards


Bill Wood

"Dick Watson" <littlegreengecko[at]mind-enufalready-spring.com> wrote in
message news:uMWR%23mbxFHA.3856[at]tk2msftngp13.phx.gbl...
- quote -

Money has always been quite zippy to me. When I tested 2003, 2004 and 2005
I found that they were noticibly slower than 2002 which is what I use.
2006, however, is almost as fast as 2002 overall and faster on budget
reports. Like Don Awalt I am running a 3.0ghz CPU on my main computer but
06 still runs acceptably fast on my old 1.5ghz PC with 768mb RAM. Money
does run slower (just barely acceptable) on my laptop (2.4ghz CPU, 1gb RAM)
but I find that laptops are slow compared to desktops.

Compared to my other applications Money is as fast as anything of comparable
complexity. The only slowdowns I see with Money are big reports, everything
else is virtually instantaneous. BWT, I don't use Money's home page which
is pretty slow. Fast hardware and a clean system is definitely the answer.
I make my living with computers so I have always had current hardware, not
the absolute bleeding edge, but fast.

Regards

Bill


- quote -

"Dick Watson" <littlegreengecko[at]mind-enufalready-spring.com> wrote in
message news:%23GZv5SWxFHA.3556[at]TK2MSFTNGP12.phx.gbl...
- quote -

Don't have 05 but 06 is plenty fast, in fact, 06 is much faster than 02 on
budget reports. I find that 02 is faster overall but 06 is very close and
definitely zippy I never had performance problems with Money because I
buy new computers every year or two but my budget reports did slow down from
their normal speed after using the same file for about 12 years or more
which is why I did the export/import routine to create a new file and that
fixed that problem. I forget when I first started using Money but it was
whenever it first came out. I also keep my computers very clean (clean
install of O/S and app software on a formatted hard drive at least every
12-18 months) and defragged daily.

Regards

Bill



- quote -

The only machine I'm running M06 on--a 850MHz 384MB PIII laptop--has minutes
of hourglass time waiting for home page draws. Let me ask you this--compared
to all other applications on your PC, does Money have more or less waiting
for it to do things?

"Don Awalt" <donawalt[at]removethisgmail.com> wrote in message
news:%23ik%234PbxFHA.2516[at]TK2MSFTNGP12.phx.gbl...
- quote -

I am very happy with the speed of '06. I just tested it -- I am on about a 1
year old 3 GHz PC, it is up and ready to log in, in 3 seconds, it's
connected through cable modem and on the home page in 5 seconds. Clicking on
any account that is most full (like family checking, lots of transactions)
brings up the ledger instantaneously.


"Dick Watson" <littlegreengecko[at]mind-enufalready-spring.com> wrote in
message news:%23GZv5SWxFHA.3556[at]TK2MSFTNGP12.phx.gbl...
- quote -

I did the same thing in moving from Money 2004 to Money 2006 (I posted a
thread on this a month or so ago), because I ws convinced that the problems
I was starting to see in Money 2004, and what I first saw in 2006, were due
to file corruption ont caught by Repair. I seem to remember now I had a
little bit of cleanup, but it was minor (dupe transactions). I just
compared balances between Money 2004 and 2006 to easily catch them.

BTW a month later, Money 2006 is running like a champ. Online updates too.
Oh - and the nuisance lousy job Money does when you first start using it, in
matching transactions (you have to wonder why it picks what it does, as
vendor, date, and amount don't match!!), now works PERFECTLY - it's like it
learns how to match over time. Very strange, but it's been flawless for
ablut 2 weeks.


"William R Wood" <w.wood[at]cox.net> wrote in message
news:u2xwysQxFHA.1124[at]TK2MSFTNGP12.phx.gbl...
- quote -

I learn't yesterday that there is one person I know who's file is 1 GB (yes,
GB)....

--
Glyn Simpson, Microsoft MVP - Money
http://money.mvps.org

Check http://money.mvps.org/faq for tips and fixes for MS Money. To send
Microsoft your product wishes see http://money.mvps.org/wishes.aspx

I do not respond to any unsolicited email regarding Money

"BeachDude" <twmonahan[at]gmail.com> wrote in message
news:1127856984.574434.256030[at]o13g2000cwo.googlegroups.com...
- quote -