Stunned

OH WOW. This is going to be a short post but I definitely wanted to share. I followed a link posted last week by Cash Money Life. It was one of those nifty Get $25 Just For Signing Up links. (See the one below! Even better, click on it!) I'm always skeptical when it comes to these things. But, I gave it a whirl. After all, I haven't been steered wrong by my fellow bloggers yet.

I signed up, and immediately got credited $25 to my account. Poof, just that easy. I sent out a referral link and got $10 for the referral. Poof, just that easy.

The best part about Revolution Money Exchange is that they don't charge fees to send or receive money. I've always been hesitant to accept money on PayPal because of the percentage they charge to receive payments on a business account. So far, RME has done exactly what they've said they will. It's user friendly. I think I'm going to like it there.

Keeping Up With The Accounts

We have 12 bank accounts. How does this happen? Quicken used to be a simple program to use, but not anymore.

In the beginning, there was just Momma. I had one checking account and one savings account. When my three young ladies started receiving child support, I opened a savings account for each of them, those accounts each receive 10% of whatever support is received.

Enter Wes, and his checking and savings account. When we combined households, we didn't combine accounts. Not for any other reason than we have automatic payments coming out of each and going into each account that would be a pain to consolidate. Not to mention that the tax debt liens do not impact my accounts the way they do his.

Last year, I got an annual bonus from my employer. I used that to start my first ING Direct savings account.

At the beginning of this year, Wes and I went into business, necessitating opening two new business checking accounts. *Note: If you intend to receive wire transfers, you should have one account for only wire transfers, and one account for all the rest of the transactions.

Once we started living on the money that I'd been stashing into our ING Direct account, I thought it would be a good idea to move $1000 (standard emergency savings, read more about it at: Being Frugal, Paid Twice, or Get Rich Slowly) into a separate ING Direct account, so that I wouldn't calculate it when determining available funds.

Then, once Wes and I started receiving payments for the consulting, I opened an ING Direct Business Savings account so that we can earn interest on the taxes we must pay quarterly.

I think that the next project will be to simplify these darned accounts. But how?

Home Accounting Programs

I spent 14 hours yesterday updating a year's worth of banking transactions. Why? Because my Microsoft Money program stopped recognizing the file extentions and wouldn't open the downloaded transactions from my bank. GRRR.

So, I now have Quicken. Downside is that it's a different file type. I had to download the entire year worth of transactions again. That means I had to approve all 2500 (yes... Two Thousand Five Hundred) transactions again. Holy cow... we do 200 transactions a month? That's INSANE.

Anyway, I was able to find $17,000 in tax deductions though. That was pretty nice. Now I have a good starting place for simplifying our finances. The new program works better and worse than Microsoft Money. Matching duplicate transactions isn't possible. That's a pain in the...er...