My name is The Family CEO and I'm a Quickenhead

Here's a site that's been making the rounds of personal finance sites: Quickenheadus Neuroticus. It's a tongue in cheek look at those of us addicted to the personal finance software, Quicken.

According to the website, here are some of the things that Quickenheads obsess about:

• When mailing a birthday present, does the postage go into the "Postal Expenses" category or should it be thrown in with "Gifts:Birthday"?
• When you suddenly think of new sub-categories, is it worth it going back all these years and splitting out all past expenses?
• Does a T-shirt bought on vacation belong to the "Clothing" or the "Travel:Souvenirs" category?

And here are some ways to tell if you're a Quickenhead:

• You constantly have an uneasy feeling about assigning expenses to your categories. "Does it really belong in that category and how have I done it in the past?" followed by a quick transaction report on anything matching "tooth" (as in toothpaste).
• After reconciling your bank savings account, you change the Payee field of the "Interest" entry to the actual name of your bank.

Some of this is sounding all too familiar!

I can't remember when I first started using Quicken but it's got to be close to ten years. I can't imagine using anything else. My particular method involves using my duplicate check records, credit card statements and bank statements and transferring the entries to Quicken. I don't use the automatic download feature because I think entering the transactions manually makes me take a harder look at where our money is going. Besides, the auto fill feature makes it easy and I enjoy doing it (I'm a nerd).

The one feature of Quicken I've never been able to truly master is the Budget feature, but then I've never had much success with budgets of any kind. Incidentally, I'm still using the 2003 version of the software (Quicken Deluxe). I'm thinking it might be time to upgrade.