Is there anyway to assign a dollar amount to a specific credit card for payment

michael 40

It would really useful to be able to budget a specific dollar payment amount for credit cards. Without that the budget is missing for me the money I transfer to those accounts. These accounts should be available to be added to the budget and possibly subtract the money allocated from the overall balance owed. There are programs outside of quicken that perform that function but for me it would be really nice to have that function as part of quicken budget process. Most of us have debt and this would me extremely useful and make the budget process more realistic.

michael 40

If any of you have used the old version of You Need A Budget you know what i am talking about.

jacobs

If you were able to add the credit card payment to your budget, you'd be double-counting your credit card spending, since each individual transaction is already counting toward the various categories of spending. That's the crux of the problem: you (reasonably) want to budget for the cash flow event of paying your credit card, while Quicken is functioning on an accrual basis of counting your expenses as they happen via credit card purchases.

And it get further complicated because there might be one solution if you pay your credit card balance in full every month, but a different solution if you pay the minimum or a fixed amount of your credit card balance every month. For instance, if you made $1,000 in credit card purchases in a month, and paid $500 to your credit card company, the Quicken budget would already count the $1,000 in your budget, so how would you expect it to account for the $500 payment?

I've never used YNAB, so I'm wondering how it handled this. In your screenshot, I see lines for such things as groceries, restaurants, clothes that might typically be purchased on a credit card, but not a line for "credit card".

michael 40

Thanks Jacob for your prompt response. YNAB allows you to enter the credit card as an account and also a credit card debt using the same account name under pre-existing obligations. New credit card purchases if made have to associated with an expense budget category or it will then become an unallocated budget amount at the top. So in that respect you either have to budget for the credit card charge before hand which i think is bogus and not realistic, so I left it as a unassigned category on that particular credit card register. Quicken use to have a module that allowed a user to setup paying off debt. You listed all your debts then based on how much you wanted to pay toward that debt it would take the interest payment and calculate the payment amount based on either the highest balance or the debt order which could be manually setup. Right now i use debt payoff planner and just setup the payment amount it designates in quicken .