I’ve been putting a fair amount of time and energy into getting organized around the old homestead. Organizing my projects, organizing my time. And for most of this year, my DH and I have been trying to stay organized with money too, with a lot more success (thanks to DR and y’all), than in previous years. We have a well defined and predictable weekly cash flow budget, we’ve set budget limits for expenditures in this-and-that categories, we have pared down or eliminated a variety of monthly expenses, we have a good feel for monthly cash/income balances, our bills are current and paid, our overall debt is doing DOWN, and happily not too many surprises now that we know Murphy is pretty much a regular visitor (the only surprise is what he’s going to break next).

The one weakness we’ve had in this whole thing, was that between the farm, the household, the debts and various other life events, we have so many transactions to log each month into our homemade budget spreadsheets, we were getting behind. We felt like we had a very good general idea of where the money was going, and we knew how to get at the specifics. But those specifics took a painfully long time to document.

So, we’ve reluctantly both come to the conclusion that we are going to abandon our very-detailed-but-too-demanding-to-maintain homemade spreadsheets, and instead do everything in Quicken.