How do you categorize legal fee under "category"?

smarcq

Hi

I had to spend legal fees for my divorce and I was wondering what category drop down item would be best suited to categorize this expense? Thank you

Tom Young

The list of Categories presented to you when you first install and run Quicken are "suggestions" only. You can use them, not use them, and create your own Categories to use instead of them. It's entirely up to you.

If you want to create a special "Legal Fees" Category for this cost, you can do that as Quicken, right out of the box, doesn't seem to have any sort of Category for the cost of hiring a lawyer. (Maybe an omission that Quicken should correct in these litigious times.)

Legal fees of this sort, as far as I know, typically don't have any income tax return significance so there's no real need to isolate this expense in a newly created Category for tax purposes, and it's a Category that, hopefully isn't an expense that you'll be regularly incurring in the future. 🤣

Even though this cost probably is a pretty significant cost, this certainly could go into a "Miscellaneous Expense" Category too; sometimes there's really no point in creating a Category that you'll probably only use one time in your life. In the future, if you're looking at your expenses over time this one-time Miscellaneous Expense will probably stand out as extraordinary large compared to Miscellaneous Expenses for other periods, but since these are your financial statements you'll instantly know "Oh yeah, divorce lawyer!"

ADDED: I didn't notice this was a "Mac" question, so maybe the Mac version of Quicken does have some sort of "personal legal fees" Category?

Jim_Harman

I second what @Tom Young said. My personal guideline for creating new Categories is things I want to track for tax purposes or I think I will be spending more than $1,000 per year on. I have a Household category that I use for miscellaneous expenses, and not long ago I created a Legal subcategory under that.

If you have an event with expenses that may cross several of your current Categories, you might create a Tag for that, so that you can easily track all the expenses associated with that event without creating new Categories. In your case, you might create a "Divorce" Tag.