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How to set aside pockets of money

JDeWP5

My wife and I would like to use Quicken to put aside pockets of money
– a new car fund, a discretionary account for her and one for me,
etc. Is there a way we can track money coming into those pockets and
being spent from those pockets strictly within Quicken Deluxe Windows
11 Home, without having to move money around actual bank accounts?

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Boatnmaniac

You might want to look into setting up Savings Goals for these things. I think they will do what you are attempting to accomplish. To read up on them go to Help and type in savings goals. Many articles will come up explaining what savings goals are and how to use them.

Let me know if this answers your question.

doerrmann

Create an asset account not linked to a bank account. You can move money to/from the asset account (i.e., "Car Fund") to decrease the amount showing as available from your balance, but not actually affect the true bank account balance. Keep in mind that the "transfers" will never show up in your bank account, so you'll need to ignore them when you reconcile.

This will get more confusing for you if you have multiple asset accounts (i.e., "His Slush Fund," "Her Slush Fund," "Car Fund"), so it may be easier to have a "Discretionary" asset account and use a spreadsheet to track the different balances within.

Boatnmaniac

I hadn't thought of using asset accounts for this before but I suppose that would work. But it also would require reconciliation be done manually instead of reconciling to the online balance so those money transfers to/from the asset accounts could be accurately accounted for.

Similar to this concept is to create manual Cash accounts which would show up in Quicken as Spending Accounts in the same grouping as checking, savings and credit cards. But, again, it would require the source account to be manually reconciled for the same as mentioned by @doerrmann .

I still think that creating Savings Goals might be the best method to use.

gtgerbo

At one time I set up categories and subcategories to accomplish this - e.g., Cookie Jar:Car, Cookie Jar:Vacation. The set-aside transaction could use a payee like "Cash to Money Jar." The result is something like a separate asset account, but it makes reconciliation a little easier.

JDeWP5

Thank you. I'm going to spend some time researching that.

mshiggins

I would consider how many transactions per month for each "pocket" you want to track.

Saving for a new car is likely one or two transactions per month to accumulate funds, then one transaction to withdraw the funds to purchase the car. This makes sense to track with the savings goal feature.

Tracking funds set aside for each spouse is likely to be many transactions per month into and out of the "pocket". This would be tedious to track with the savings goal feature. Instead consider using tags to track each spouse's spending. Using reports subtotaled by tag, you could periodically review spending by each spouse.

Some example transactions using tags:

Boatnmaniac

Then, again, perhaps the easiest way to manage the types of "pockets" that you would like to have is to do what you are trying to avoid doing:

Open a high yield savings account for the car purchase.
Open a checking account for your wife's discretionary spending.
Open a checking account for your discretionary spending.

If you do this with your current bank then the amount of effort to set them up should be rather minimal and once they are done it becomes a relatively easy task to plan, budget for and to maintain. Just set up recurring transfers into the account that happen automatically each pay period, each month or whatever. Then you and your wife would have full control to manage your respective checking accounts however you wish. All of the transactions that occur in each account could be downloaded from your bank during OSU (assuming the bank supports Quicken). And there would be no need to do anything special regarding reconciliation because each account would stand on it's own.

No matter which of the earlier suggested methods that you might do it will require ongoing regular manual maintenance in order to make them work properly and to keep them all in balance. If what you are wanting to do is a long-term objective then you might find the level of effort to be undesirable.

To add to @Boatnmaniac 's suggestion just above this, most modern banks offer savings "buckets" feature, where you do not have to open an account, rather create buckets within an existing account for this exact purpose. Think of this as a Parent folder and sub-folders within it. Many traditional banks are also beginning to offer such features as well to compete and attract younger generation and promote money management.