To the $52 spent to upgrade to a more modern computer, add $43.31 since only God knows where my Quicken 2001 disc is located. I had to upgrade to Quicken Deluxe 2008. It was on sale at Best Buy, $20 off the normal price of $60. I think I could have gotten it for a few dollars less and could have gone through one of the online rebate portals if I'd bought it online, but I needed to have it right away, so bought it at the brick and mortar store. I'm not one to upgrade every time a new program comes out – the fact that I've been merrily working in Quicken 2001 should prove that. And if you must know, I'm a huge Adobe Photoshop fan, but at home I'm still using v5.0!

I tried once to use the “download transactions” feature with Quicken 2001 and messed something up which caused me to be hesitant about using it ever since. However, it is taking inordinate amounts of time to enter in every single receipt – and when receipts are missing, I still have to print out the online snapshot of the account and manually enter everything into Quicken.

So… I decided to try downloading the transactions again, and see if it helps any at all. I will of course still keep my receipts and enter the details for the ones that are present (unfortunately receipts still seem to come up missing which drives me a little batty to be honest).

I've been testing this new Quicken out yesterday and today. So far it seems to be making the process easier. I do however, see the danger in growing lax at entering the details. If we just bought food for our goats from the feedstore, that would be fine to attribute it all to our goat business. But we also buy lay crumble for the chickens. If we only bought groceries from Walmart, I could attribute all Walmart reciepts to food, but we don't. So I must guard against taking the easy way out and just downloading the transactions and going with it. I am hoping because it's easier to get all the transactions listed it will still save time, even though I have to go through and enter each receipt.

Today, before I sat down at my computer, I thought instead I'd lie down and take a nap, since I was feeling tired. But first I wanted to check in with my feedreader and see if anyone had posted since I checked yesterday. While reading a few posts put up today, I suddenly felt inspired to get busy on figuring out where we are financially. I am apprehensive about seeing the final number, but I know it won't be too horrible. I mean, it's not like we went another $10,000 into debt or anything like that!

One thing I find extremely aggravating is when a program takes a perfectly useful feature in an older version and gets rid of it in the newer ones. For example, in the old Quicken, if I wanted to search in an amount field, I would click on any amount, click Find and the Find box would already be set to search amount. Not so with the latest and greatest version of Quicken. This is the only glitch I've found thus far, so I guess I really can't complain. I was able to import my backup file with data starting back in 2002, so that was good.

I'm finally done putting everything I know about into Quicken. It looks like we are about $1400 more in credit card debt. However, since this is the exact cost of the machinery Mr. A purchased, that just about makes it right. Unfortunately I have had to make a lot of additional purchases this month. More on that with my July report, which I hope to have put together within the next week. I can't post a report for the month of July yet, as I have not yet entered detail to all the entries.

Mr. A is billing a client tomorrow for work that will bring in enough money to cover our budget needs until the end of the month, and still has more work to complete for the client. His ex-employer also says he will call him on Monday regarding a couple of projects.

I'm relieved to at least know where we stand financially, and that I've got all the bills paid to date. I can relax for a few days but it will start over again next payday, which arrives Friday.

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