Yes, I know I’m behind already in my March Madness entries. But I’ve been doing something muy importante (is that even Spanish – who knows!). Before I get into that though, I’d like to know what you all do with your … finances.

Seriously. Here’s what I do (taught by my illustrious and anal father and his partner in crime, my mother), but I’m starting to believe, we’re the only ones:
1. I maintain all our finances on Quicken.
2. I enter all our credit card transactions with a category assigned to each (e.g., dining, entertainment, clothing, etc.) into their own accounts (we have three cards)
3. I enter all of our bank withdrawals, checks, electronic funds payments into our banking account (same categorization, e.g., gas & electric, petty cash, gift received – thanks mom!)
4. When I receive a monthly credit card statement, I compare everything I have recorded against what the credit card company tells me I’ve charged, and if I find anything in error, I call the company and dispute the charge (and yes, this does happen on occasion). Once it all checks out, I make a payment (now a days, online). Then I take all my receipts for that month, staple them to the statement and file it away.
5. When I receive my bank statement, I do the same thing (often having to enter the checks at this point because I rarely write checks any more – mostly to Chris’s church and the kids’ schools). Once that’s done, I file it away too.
6. In January, I take the files with the credit card statements and receipts in them, and I give them to Chris. What he is supposed to do is take the ones from seven years ago dispose of them (but I don’t think he’s doing that) and file the new ones away in our larger file cabinets in the basement.
7. In about February or March I run a series of reports, so I can do my taxes. I click a button on Quicken and it tells me how much we donated to charity, how much we spent on medical, etc. Once I get all that info, I ship it and tax forms (e.g., W-2, 1090s) to my accountant who for what I consider a totally worth it expense, fills out our returns (because of Chris’s travel, there have been years where we’ve had to file in up to six states).
So to give you a clue as to how I’ve been spending some of my time over the last three days, let me just tell you for the last 18 months – none of the above has happened (well, I did pay the credit cards online but that’s it).
More on this later but how do you all handle your finances? Am I crazy?