Freshly retired - so new priorities in my finances tracking - fresh Quicken file and setup?

kmkelmor · September 3

Quicken Classic Premier r64.23 on Windows 11.

I've just retired, 🎉🕶️ in fact, I'll get one more paycheck. but I'm realizing I need different things out of my finance tracking now. I've never really reconciled, I just entered net salary, I'm sure I set up credit cards whatever was the easiest way, looked at the budgeting once but it didn't seem to budget the way my brain did so never ended up using those features, just basically imported from my institutions and made sure balances jived…

Now I definitely want to budget, I want to track my retirement investments stuff closely, want to maximize accurate tax categorization to hopefully not need an accountant this year… And, I want to be able to use some of my cash savings as very select multi-year low-interest loans to very select and vetted locals who just need that little extra boost to move from being a renter to being a homeowner. Kind of my own neighborhood grameen bank. So need to be able to track that pretty intensively for me to prove to the IRS that it wasn't a gift, and for them to claim their interest payments on their taxes etc.

Is this shift in focus enough to warrant "retiring" my current Quicken file and setting up a new one from scratch?

Thanks for opinions and ideas - especially those that explain their reasoning!

kmk🤖

NotACPA · September 3

I wouldn't retire your current file. It still has historical info that could prove useful

In building a budget, besides looking at your current data, also look at your most recent tax return(s), to see what tax related categories you might want to include.

And those "Grameen" loans (BTW, the real founder was a Vanderbilt alum … as are my wife and I) would be offline assets from your perspective.

re: investments, look into "Complete" vs "Simple" investment recording in Q. Simple only shows positions and balances, not transactions … so you'd probably want complete.

Also note that, in Q, you can't record a taxable action in a retirement type account. SO, when you take an IRA/401k/etc type withdrawal, transfer the entire amount to the taxable account and then record a split with the total xfer on one line as a positive number and the tax portion as a negative amount on the next line. That will cause the amount in the taxable account register to reflect what you actually receive.

Freshly retired - so new priorities in my finances tracking - fresh Quicken file and setup?

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