Bucks In

March 1996

In some ways, life can be very simple when you are poor.

I have never been really really poor, the kind of poor where you have to skip out of town because you don't have the rent, or where visiting a soup kitchen is considered a night out on the town. But when I was in college, I had just enough cash for board and room, and relied on a scholarship to pay for the tuition. When I graduated and went to work for World Wide Widgets, I started at such a low position that they did not even have a job title demeaning enough to accurately portray my position in the corporate hierarchy.

But I was finally on my own. No more living in a dorm. At the Jesuit run USF, the term then in vogue for such a life was "in loco parentis",which translated from the Latin means that you may have left your parent's house, but baby, you are under our roof now, and you gotta follow our rules. No more living with parents who went to bed at 8PM so they could get up long before the chickens did, and thought everybody else (I had no brothers or sisters, so I was pretty much "everybody else") should do so also. I could finally watch the Full Jack Parr show.

The only problem with all this was that now I had to pay for it. I rented an apartment a mile from work, so that I did not need to get a car right away. (Turns out, that little toy got delayed for something like 10 years.) It came with rented beat up furniture (which, 25 years later, I still have). My parents started me off with some knives, forks, plates, pots, pans, and other essentials that I had never had the need or foresight to accumulate.

I quickly found out that my University education, while rich in philosophy and science, was sadly lacking in home economics. Visions of nightly filet mignon dinners with fine wine and Caesar salad quickly vanished because a) I realized that I did not have the foggiest idea how to cook, and b) Safeway doesn't give this stuff away, you really gotta pay really big bucks for it. This stuff had always magically appeared in the past, either at my parent's table or in the dorm cafeteria. Welcome to the real world, third rock from the sun.

Those first few months were quite grim, financially. I kind of knew that WWW was not showering me with largesse when they hired me, but when the food ran out before the next paycheck came in, reality set in. And the thing was, I couldn't for the life of me figure out where all the money was going to. I realized that I had to cut back on expenses, but I didn't even know what my expenses were.

Enter the Little Black Book. Most guys my age carried a LBB, but they were generally filled with names and phone numbers, and usually not those of other guys. I started filling mine in with income and outgo numbers. Mostly outgo, as it turned out. Everything, down to the five cent hot chocolate from the vending machines at work, to the $1.98 dinners I started having at a Chinese run German restaurant down the street from where I worked. (This was 1969, don't forget). I did this for years. Eventually, I gained, and then lost, my first true love. So for a while the LBB did have a female name and phone number in it. When she dumped me, I consoled myself by realizing I had only spent ninety eight cents a pound on her during the relationship, since I had written down all the expenditures, and I had somehow found out what she weighed. Even filet mignon cost more than that, even then.

For probably 15 years, I never had a checkbook. I paid cash for everything. Then WWW started me doing a lot of traveling. You really cannot travel anywhere without several credit cards. You need an American Express card for the hotel, a car rental card, a telephone calling card, and in those days you even got an airline travel card. (I only got the red [domestic] one, and lusted after the green [international] one that all the big boys had). Then airlines started frequent flyer programs. Then I bought a house. Then I got into a couple of investments (bought PSA at 22 ["can't lose"], sold at 6). And finally my secretary found out that at age 40 I still did not have a checking account. She knew that the WWW credit union was giving away gifts for members that brought in new members, and so she took my by the ear and marched me down to their offices to sign me up. And got her gift. And further complicated my financial life. I could no longer just look in my wallet to see if I could afford to buy something (like pork chops for that night's dinner), but now had to balance a checkbook as well.

Eventually, keeping track of my financial records required not only the LBB, but a bound ledger. I would laboriously scribe down every Visa transaction, every check written, every airline mile flown, every house payment, every paycheck received, every ... And then try to balance the books when the various bills and statements would roll in. Maybe this would not have been so bad, except that I wrote everything down in ink...

About four years ago, I discovered the answer to all these problems: Quicken. Quicken is a product from Intuit corp, street price about $35, that keeps track of all these little ledger problems. I probably could have written a spreadsheet to do the job, but at that time, I had never played with one. With Quicken, I can still micro manage my life, but at least I don't have to do the math any more. (There are other similar products on the market, including Microsoft Money that for some reason you can get for free from their web site.)

I am using Quicken for Windows Version 2. Quicken is currently up to version 5, with a Deluxe version that has a cd rom which contains some video clips of some eggheads who earn maybe $200,000 a year, and They are going to tell You how to manage your life? There are also DOS and Mac versions. I have so far resisted upgrading, and even though ComputorLink may be a widely respected educational tool here in the Spokane area, not many software companies are beating down our doors with free products to test.

When Quicken comes up, you get a bunch of dorky icons on a button bar that fortunately have labels, which even more fortunately you rarely need to use. You also see a box that lists all your accounts. These accounts can be bank accounts, checking accounts, credit card accounts, stock markets, and as I said before, I even use it to keep track of my airline frequent flyer mileage. (There is a summary page that is supposed to tell you your net worth, but it does not understand that 200,000 frequent flyer miles do not translate into $200K of assets.)

Double clicking an account brings up a window that looks something like a check register. They have several different types of accounts, from checking, to credit card, to stocks and bonds, and they all look slightly different, and have slightly different functionality, but are intuitively similar.

This register window contains a field for a date, check number, item description, amount paid, and it keeps a running total of how much you are in the hole. It also contains fields to define a category of the item, like charity, mortgage, and such, and these things are supposed to help you if you want to use Quicken with Intuit's Turbo Tax at the end of the year. It would probably work, but it takes more smarts than I have to set up these categories in a useful fashion, so I have not taken much advantage of it.

The really neat feature comes when you get your statement. It took some playing around to really learn how to use this (not to mention some help from the MBA next door). But now when a check statement comes in, you punch the "reconcile" button, and you get a popup list of all outstanding checks. For each item on your statement, you click off the corresponding item on the Quicken list. When you are all done, you should have a zero difference between the statement and your Quicken list. If you do not, you probably screwed up, and likely entered an improper amount somewhere. No problem. Just identify which amount was improper, bring up the register window, change the value, and all the mathematics update instantly (generally showing that you were deeper in the hole that you thought you were).

The stocks and bonds register can produce a graph tracking the selling price of the item for some past time in history. Since every graph I would have is a straight down line, this has not interested me much. There is also a reporting function built into the program that is supposed to let you get a printout of your various accounts, sorted by various ways. I tried to use it once WithOut Reading The Free Manual, and never made any sense of it.

I have an IRA, consisting of CDs, and in this category the program is very difficult, and very non intuitive to use. IRAs often have annual fees, and often when an IRA rolls over, the bank generates a new stack of CDs, sometimes several such (if you bought them at different times). My version of the program does not handle the multiplicity of CDs within one account well at all. For instance, it will tell you how much it thinks is in each CD, but only to the dollar. When it comes time to transfer the money, there is no easy way to deal with the niddling little pennies, but without dealing with them, you cannot zero out your balance. Maybe they have fixed this in later releases. I wrote them a letter about it, and they wrote back and told me to stick it in my ear. To deal with the annual fees, you have to do some bogus selling and buying of accounts, rather than just tell the silly program that your lousy bank ripped you off again.

For all practical purposes, I have jettisoned my bound ledger. (I went looking for it when I started writing this article, and I cannot even find it). I kept the LBB going for cash in and out tracking, until the beginning of 1995 when I got married, and the idea of personal cash ceased to exist. Now I just hand all my cash to my lovely wife, and spaghetti and pork chops somehow appear on the dinner table. I am still looking forward to those filet mignon dinners with fine wine and Caesar salad, but I will probably have to retire first and finally learn to cook.