Yesterday night, I decided to get serious about creating a budget for myself. I consider myself to be a saver, so I thought I was doing quite well with how I managed my money so far. But lately, the amount on my visa account is creeping up, and it’s been quite consistent for the past 2 months, so I thought I better investigate on what might caused this increase in spending.
There were 2 software products that I tried: Quicken for Mac and Moneywell. I’ve heard good things about both, so i started off with Quicken for Mac. After setting up the software, I proceeded to create a new account for my chequing account at CIBC. Scrolling through the list of banks, I realized that CIBC was not listed anywhere. Uh-oh. It seems like the software only contains a list of American banks, so how am I going to synchronize my bank statements into the software if I am not able to create a CIBC account in Quicken? I did some quick Googling, and found out that I can at least download the statement from CIBC and import it to the software, so that’s what I did next. By doing so, another problem arise. When I download the statements from CIBC, it gives me a file with .qfx file format. During the importing of the file, Quicken gaves me an error:
As I found out later, this problem arises because “Intuit’s Quicken software will only import QFX files where the providing institution has paid the fee and in some cases passed quality tests, otherwise giving the error message.”
So I guess I’m out of luck with Quicken. It’s just too much trouble to deal with when I just want a simple budgeting system to track my earning and spending.
Next up: Moneywell.
Setting up an account in Moneywell is similar to Quicken. I could not find CIBC on the list of banks. I tried to create the account myself, but I think that defeats the purpose because I know I wouldn’t be able to keep manually entering the transactions to the program on a regular basis. I was about to give up until I tried to import the .qfx file from CIBC that I downloaded earlier. Surprisingly, the program was able to read and import all the data from the file. The data defaults to be separated by month, and it shows you whether you are in the green or in the red (blue bar in the software) for each month. Also it allows you to categorize each of your transaction into different “buckets”, so you know exactly how much from each “bucket” that you are spending on each month. There are other functionalities, but that is all I have time for last night, so I will explore more in the near future.
After going through downloading my visa statements and categorizing both my chequing account and visa transactions to their respective “buckets”, I was surprised at the numbers. I didn’t realize how much cash I withdraw from my bank account each month. It was in shock!
Thankfully with this budget software, I now have a better perspective on my spending habits and I will definitely need to create a strict budget that will fit both my income and my lifestyle. As much as I love Gail Vaz-Oxlade from the show “Til Debt do us part“, I don’t want her come knocking on MY door!
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