Everything Else - revisited

gregziolk

I have read through dozens of articles and I think I understand how "Everything Else" works in the Quicken Budget - it's a catch all for parent/child categories and prevents "budget leaks". I get all that and I appreciate it for rare expense tracking that i don't explicitly budget for. I use the budget to manage my salary/bonuses/taxes and expenses. My day to day operating accounts.

However, I have all of my investments in Quicken, and that includes my monthly brokerage fees that I pay to my financial adviser, as well as all of my dividends, cap gains, etc. All of that is managed by my financial adviser, I don't care that I made XX in dividends and paid YY for his services, as that is all handled in my brokerage accounts and does not affect my day to day operations. But because I assign categories to those items, they show up in my budget.

There is something else strange about the budget - my interest income (both in my savings account as well as all my investments) shows up under the Income portion of my budget monthly graph, but not the Annual View. It appears that only the Expenses that are "everything else" shows up at the bottom of the Annual View, so that throws things off even further.

I truly don't want to have some categories in my budget, like brokerage fees or capital gains/losses, or payments for medical out of my HSA account, as that is a completely different account then my day-to-day operating account. I use the budget to track the money that goes into checking and the money that goes out of checking and that's it.

Is there any way to achieve this using Quicken Budget, or do I just have to manually calculate out all of the stuff in a spreadsheet?

Tom Young

You certainly can decide what Categories and what Accounts are part of your budget, ignoring the rest.  Under the button "Budget Actions" you have "Select categories to budget..." and "Select accounts..."   Use those to tell Quicken exactly what Accounts you want included and excluded and likewise with Categories.

gregziolk

Thanks Tom! Your comment helped considerably with the "Select Accounts..." idea. That allows me to keep things categorized the way I want, but eliminates the investment accounts and HSA account (but it still let's me explicitly transfer to the HSA!). Now, "Fees" in my operating account still show up, but "Fees" in my brokerage do not. This gets me most of the way to where I want to be and leaves "everything else" with just the "budget leaks", which is way more manageable and I can handle by either budgeting for them, or leaving them alone.

Thank you very much!

Tom Young

You certainly can decide what Categories and what Accounts are part of your budget, ignoring the rest.  Under the button "Budget Actions" you have "Select categories to budget..." and "Select accounts..."   Use those to tell Quicken exactly what Accounts you want included and excluded and likewise with Categories.

gregziolk

Thanks Tom! Your comment helped considerably with the "Select Accounts..." idea. That allows me to keep things categorized the way I want, but eliminates the investment accounts and HSA account (but it still let's me explicitly transfer to the HSA!). Now, "Fees" in my operating account still show up, but "Fees" in my brokerage do not. This gets me most of the way to where I want to be and leaves "everything else" with just the "budget leaks", which is way more manageable and I can handle by either budgeting for them, or leaving them alone.

Thank you very much!