How do I calculate how much discretionary income I have in Quicken?
I'm coming from a zero sum budget application, where I gave every dollar a job by assigning it to a budget category. The way I did it was assign money to non-discretionary categories first, discretionary ( movies, video games, eating out ) second, and whatever was left over I would divide amongst my current goals. It may be for buying new furniture, saving for a car, additional retirement savings, etc.
1) How would I find out how much money I have "left over" in quicken. I included all of my known expenses in my budget , so does subtracting my budgeted amount from my bank account balances give me my discretionary income , to do with as I see fit?
2) Related to 1). How can I see a total of my non-discretionary expenses for each month. That amount would be monthly + quarterly/4 + annual/12 + biannual/6 + .... you get the idea. That would help me with 1). I've entered all of my recurring bills in Quicken, so it has this information. I need to know how to extract it from Quicken.
Admittedly, I haven't used the report feature of Quicken yet, so there might be a way to create a report to get these numbers.
