Splitting Expenses for Dual-Income Family

Question

I just bought Quicken after using a spreadsheet to budget for the last few years. I have a dual-income family and every month I would calculate the percentage of income each person is contributing. I would then divide the total amount of expenses based off of the percentages and that would be the amount myself and my wife were accountable for. For example: if this month, I made $200 and my wife made $800, if the expenses for the month were $100, I'd be responsible for $20 and my wife $80. In the spreadsheet, this was a few simple formulas that would update based on the values I updated every month for the bills.

Is there a way to create a monthly report in Quicken that does something similar? For instance: a report that states the amount of income certain account have contributed for the month AND what percentage of the expenses were covered (should be covered) from those accounts.

Tom Young · Answer

I'm not exactly sure why you're doing what you're doing here.  Typically married couples pool their income and expenses and allocating an expense - groceries say - based on the income of each spouse just doesn't strike me as realistic or adding much in the way of useful information.

That said, if you want to continue doing this process then when you run your monthly Income and Expense by Category report simply export that report to Excel, do your calculation of the split percentages, and then apply that allocation to all of the expense Categories.  Once you have your Quicken report all set up you should be able to set up an Excel "template" that does the calculation automatically once you provide the information.

NotACPA · Answer

No longer a need to dual-calculate. You can just input each person's income directly into Q with separate txn for each and separate Tax lines foe each.

Same for actual expenses.

Q can then report the actual amounts.