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Personal Finance
Managing personal finances is of course one of the main uses for a home
office. You can save a lot of time managing your personal or
home office finances by using software such as Quicken or Microsoft
Money and choosing banks and credit cards that work with those
applications. Choosing a bank or credit card that works with those applications is also an invaluable home money management tool. Why? Because your transactions can be AUTOMATICALLY downloaded, without you having to enter them by hand. Hand entry is a time-consuming, error-prone process, so automated download is crucial. If you have more than one person spending in your household or home office, try to enforce using a credit or debit card from the banks that you are tracking within Quicken or Microsoft Money. This will allow you to see where the money is going, within minutes or hours of the money being spent. For budgeting purposes this is very important. If money is tight, you can review your monthly budget every day and make adjustments to your spending, on the fly. Also, when you want to balance your checkbook, both of these applications have a step by step process that allows you to balance very easily. If your transactions have been downloaded from the bank, balancing your checkbook will take seconds because the transactions will have less errors. Avoid writing checks if you can, because they have to clear the bank and they take longer to show up as a downloaded transaction. This makes interim budgeting sessions much more difficult because you have to remember to enter the checks yourself or wait for them to clear the bank to be downloaded automatically. If you're not sure whether your bank supports downloaded transactions, you can go to your bank's website or call your bank's technical department and ask about direct download into Money or Quicken. If your bank only supports downloading your transactions from their website - switch to another bank! Make your personal finances easy to manage! There's another feature to running your transactions through a credit card - rewards programs! Make your credit card expenditures a part of your monthly budget - you don't want to pay huge interest fees every year; instead, make your credit card work FOR you! If you have the discipline to pay off your credit card every month, then you can use your credit card and get great rewards such as airline miles or cash back. This is an excellent personal finance idea! More tips on using credit cards... My favorite credit card, and the one I use personally is from CapitalOne. It has 1% cash back on all purchases, and 2% cash back on groceries and gas, and no yearly fees. I run all of my bills through it as well, so every month I get a check for $70 or so! I found that this is better than a mileage card because the mileage cards usually have an earnings cap - you can only earn so many miles; and with blackout dates, only certain airlines, ticket prices, and other nonsense, it's so much hassle! Personally I'd rather have the cash, so that I have the freedom to decide what to use it on! Here's the capital one website... Done with Personal Finance? Back to more Home Office Ideas!
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