Another dreary, rainy day here in Brooklyn. I have taken advantage of the weather by staying in and catching up on my finances. I don’t know about other people, but I seem to spend an inordinate amount of time at the computer tracking my finances. I use Quicken 2007, and track just about everything I spend. it takes 1-2 hours each week to enter all my receipts, and then another half hour or so to pay all my bills. That adds up to about eight hours per month, or 96 hours per year. It’s depressing to think about it that way. Then there are days like today where I spend several hours going through and filing the stack of papers, receipts and bills that I’ve stuffed into the middle drawer of my desk, and it starts to feel like a second job.
But the good side of it is that now I can click a button in Quicken and see exactly where my money has gone over the past six months. And at the beginning of next year I’ll be able to print out a few reports and have everything ready that I need to pay my taxes. There are pros and cons to everything.
I’ve been doing well financially for the past several months. My book business is thriving. I had another great find last weekend — a trove of architecture books, and the person I got them from will be selling more soon. And I’ve been relatively frugal, which is beginning to pay off. In two weeks I will pay off my 401k account loan, which will free up another $460 per month to pay off other things.