Adding dividend investment income to budgets

bcollinsmn

I know this is probably going to duplicate other posts but my search online revealed mostly posts from around 2019 and, well, it's 2024 and I'm hoping the ability to add dividend income to a personal budget has been added since then.

There's no way to manually categorize dividend income as DIV INC (the standard category) in the downloaded investment activity. The category box is grayed out with the words "Requires misc. amount" with no explanation nor ability to enter anything. But the big problem is there's no category. If there were, it would be relatively easy to manually add DIV INC and then bring that standard category into the budget.

This seems like a slam dunk on features since, especially for retired people, this is a major source of income and without it, the budget doesn't really make any sense.

I'm using Quicken Classic Premier R54.9

Thank you for your time

Tom Young

When you receive a dividend and it's entered into your Transaction List (Register) in the fashion you've shown, the associated Category Quicken assigns to that income is _DivInc. The Quicken Categories for all the various "investment" incomes that you might record such as interest, capital gains, etc. have that underscore ("_") as the first character in their names, like _IntInc, _RlzdGain, and so forth. These Categories are normally hidden since Quicken is assigning these categories based on the "action" associated with the transaction entries.

You certainly can include all this in the budgeting process in both the Budget and Actual columns.

Click on "Manage Budget Categories", select "Personal Income", and you should see the option to include dividends:

and if you put the dividend in the "Miscellaneous" field and specify the "Div Income" Category, that dividend will show up in the budgeting screen.

If you click on "Show hidden categories" on that screen the ALL the Quicken-assigned Categories become available and you can select those:

Jim_Harman

This is another case where Quicken's built-in Categories do not make sense.

The "Div Income" Category is visible but is not the one that is used when you record dividends in an Investing account. As @Tom Young shows, when you record investment income, Quicken uses the normally hidden _DivInc Category, and you must know to check the Show hidden categories box and include that if you want to include investing dividends in your budget.

Very confusing!