Thursday, September 13, 2007

Day 2 with Quicken 2008

Today I got a little more in depth with the program. I filled out the retirement planner and debt reduction planner. I have to say I am impressed. Lets start out with the retirement planner. I went through the simple setup and just inputed all the data that was asked for. Very easy to do and does not take too much time. On my first try, it stated that with a retirement goal of 2035, I would have depleted funds by 2038 on a $20k/yr living for retirement at my current savings/income pace. What an eye-opener. I actually missed inputting a lot of information my first time through. I did not set any return rates on my investments and I also did not do reoccurring retirement deposits. On my 2nd attempt, it stated that I would run out of money by 2068 on a $30/yr living after retirement. This caused me some concern cause I always thought I would have enough for my retirement stage of life. I'm going to have to reconsider how much I can contribute to my Roth IRA's and other investment accounts. My new job offers a 401k however there is no company matching, so I will have to do some research into that.

Now the other planner I did on Quicken was the debt reduction. I was going to compare the numbers with what I am currently using which is Money Mastery. Based on Money Mastery I will be out of debt using their current payment methods in May 2009. Using Quicken, they suspect I will be out of debt if I follow their payment methods in April 2009. I found Quicken's debt reduction very simple. I did not have to input any of my accounts, it automatically grabbed it from the program itself and everything is up to date since I have it linked with my online service. It takes the same approach as Money Mastery using the snowball effect. The only difference is I can update the numbers at anytime much easier than Money Mastery and there are nice graphs and reports that I can print out.

Overall I had a good experience with these 2 planners. Once I get a steady paycheck I will do the tax planning and also the savings planner. I was going to create a budget however it automatically takes all your past info (you get to set the dates) and since I have no information (only have Sept information inputted), it did not provide an accurate budget. I will test out the budget planner during December.

So far Quicken gets an A!




3 comments:

Blaine561 said...

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